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'?

Outpatient appointments should be as useful as possible to the Children and Young People that we serve. We want patients to attend well prepared for their consultation, and this project will help us increase preparation for the appointment (through developing and sending pre-appointment information and related questionnaires out prior to this appointment).  We will use interpreters to speak to families where needed to ensure the same pre-appointment readiness.  These resources would also encourage Advice and Guidance, helping primary care to support for these patients in the community.

This will reduce delays in accessing health by reducing missed appointments and ensuring appointments are as helpful as possible; reducing the need for some follow-up appointments because initial consultations were not as useful as they could have been. Implementing these surveys will mean we can improve communication with families and the clinical teams, meaning any pre-appointment work can be done ahead of time.

What does your project aim to achieve?

This project aims to achieve better outpatient attendance experiences for families, and a reduction of unnecessary follow-up appointments due to clinicians not having all relevant information to hand. Specifically, this project will support all families by working towards a better quality of clinical consultation where pre-appointment communication is required.

As the main benefit of this project, we expect to see an increase in patient readiness and preparation in outpatients. As a measurable for this, we would expect to see an increase in discharge and/or an increase in the number of patients listed for surgery at their first appointment.

For patients where English is an additional language and pre-appointment information is required (through the surveys), we will obtain this information via telephone calls in the family’s language. This telephone call will also act as a reminder for the appointment, delivering a fringe benefit of increased outpatient attendance for these families.

How will the project be delivered?

This project will fit within the Trust’s existing programme and project management governance structure and will use our project management processes, to include Risk, Issue, and escalation management as well as Quality and Equality Impact Assessments.

The module of the patient portal that we wish to use has already been procured, however is not in use across the organisation, so any risks around procurement or technical implementation have been resolved.

The Project team have had early conversations with clinical teams, however identifying specific pathways and surveys that would be required is underway.

Our interpreter providers are already in contract, and ensures the level of quality and assurance of language skills that would be needed.

How is your project going to share learning?

Learning throughout the project will be captured on an ongoing basis and will relate to the elements of Patient Information surveys , Interpreters surveys and Advice and Guidance information to primary care.  We are also planning to include patient attendance rates, conversion rates to theatre and qualitative feedback from patients in this learning.

All of this learning will be generalisable and shared via the production of case studies shared with the Q community and beyond using the Trust’s existing relationships with the Children’s Hospital Alliance, benchmarking networks and beyond.