What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme of 'How can improvement be used to reduce delays accessing health and care services'?

Patients with Prostate cancer who undergo radiotherapy treatment are routinely reviewed at least every 6 months for 5 years post treatment. Due to ever increasing patient numbers and reduced staffing resources there is a backlog in reviewing prostate patients who have undergone radiotherapy treatment and these patients are waiting longer than intended between their routine reviews. A regular blood test (PSA) is standard to monitor any possible recurrence, and for some patients not being called for regular reviews, may cause them to forget to have this blood test done routinely and not to be monitoring these results for any increases. These patients can also experience bowel and urinary toxicity and may have erectile dysfunction issues post treatment.

What does your project aim to achieve?

This project would utilise recognised standard questionnaires for bowel, urinary and erectile side effects, and quality of life, and allow recent PSA blood test results to be inputted by the patient onto an app based electronic questionnaire. These results could then be automatically assessed by the system and if any trigger points reached, this would cause an email to be sent to a health professional indicating the need for further action.

This would be web-based and accessible on any device, smartphone, tablet or pc. This review questionnaire would be automatically sent via text or email to patients at the pre-set time periods ensuring that they can complete the data and return for assessing.

This would also mean that from the backlog of patients we could prioritise those that require urgent reviews based on information provided, and ensure that these patients are seen sooner.

How will the project be delivered?

The project will be delivered in partnership between Evergreen Health Solutions Limited and the Western Health and Social Care Trust.

Evergreen Healthcare Solutions has a strong history of providing digital solutions to the radiotherapy community and is currently used by the Western Trust to provide its radiotherapy referral platform.

The proposed system will automatically flag patients who trigger a toxicity score or PSA increase that requires further action, for a clinical decision to then be made about the appropriate next step for that individual.

Patients will be educated in advance that face-to face follow up may not be required if they have no trigger points or the frequency of face-to face reviews decreased to cope with the increasing numbers of patients on follow-up.

Clinical and administration staff will work closely to manage distribution of questionnaires and action of flagged patient responses to improve the patents experience and timeliness of treatment.

How is your project going to share learning?

Our project uses an innovative way to supplement current patient review process and reduce delays in the current prostate radiotherapy review waiting list.

Clinicians will be alerted to patients who most require intervention and resources can be prioritised accordingly.

This will require a fully multidisciplinary approach to manage distribution of electronic questionnaires response actions.

Learning will be shared across the oncology team local, regionally at appropriate forums and nationally at peer reviews groups and meetings.

Working closely with the Trust Quality Improvement Team, learning can be shared with other departments within the Trust to adopt similar models for other services.

Patients will benefit from a simple easy to use application which will give them better access to the services they require and empower them to regain more control over their healthcare journey.