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'?

A significant proportion of our capacity is lost every week due to patient’s not attending their booked appointments (DNA’s). The reasons for these vary, but evidence suggests that reasons for DNAs within patients’ control include:
-Patient has forgotten about the appointment.
-Patient has not attended because they felt they no longer needed the appointment

A finding that is reflected in Croydon Health Services, in particular for urgent cancer diagnostics. A simple appointment reminder can make a huge difference and in some cases has shown to reduce DNA’s by 80%.

Technological solutions for this problem exist and include patient-led booking systems, however we intend to better understand our local population, the communication needs that may not be met through technological solutions and contribute to tackling health inequalities by ensuring that patients in need of urgent suspected cancer diagnostics are seen when needed, delivering the high standards of care, maximising productivity and efficiency.

What does your project aim to achieve?

Reducing the number slots lost to DNA patients will allow all patients to be seen sooner. Waiting lists will reduce and we will deliver the right care to the right patient at the right time. The reduced demand will also reduce the need to run additional lists using overtime or agency cover thus maximise productivity and efficieny. Through the pilot period we will gather data that will serve to help us better understand the population communication needs, help to reduce inequity in access to healthcare and inform how we progress digital solutions to patient-centred booking systems.

How will the project be delivered?

An Outpatient transformation board, which is clinically led and co-chaired by acute a primary stakeholders has been set up to transform outpatient services. A project team has been established and baseline data analytics are in progress.

we will pilot the use of an admin support staff on a fixed term contract to call patients the day prior to their appointment. Their primary role will be to confirm attendance or rebook their slot with urgent requests where it is no longer required by the patient. During this call we will collect pertinent anaylitics, overlaying geographics and demographic data to better understand the potential inequity of access to care, and communication needs of our “DNA” population . After the 6 month pilot we will review our findings, to learn and shape how our technological solutions may better address the needs of our population and improve how we communicate with our service users

How is your project going to share learning?

The programme board is a join acute a primary care membership, therefor learning will be shared across Croydon place, this will in-turn feed into system learning.

We will share our findings within Q Community SIGs