Sustained Gynaecology waiting list reduction through improved outpatient clinic capacity utilisation
Customer
Tallaght University Hospital (TUH) is one of Ireland’s major academic teaching hospitals. With 562 beds, 16 theatres and 26 critical care beds – the 3,500 staff treat over 410,000 patients per year.
Problem
Increasing wait times for new and return appointments
TUHs Gynaecology Outpatient Department (OPD) service was experiencing high but flat demand for its services. The Clinicians had a number of challenges in managing their clinic capacity. These included space constraints and overlapping operating room commitments and sessional commitments in the Coombe Maternity Hospital. In the first quarter of 2022 MedModus were asked to facilitate the clinical and administrative team in developing a strategy for optimising the service’s OPD capacity.
Solution
Implement a Capacity optimisation approach
MedModus facilitated the Gynaecology team using MedModus proven Scheduled Care four step Capacity Optimisation approach:
- Assess the 5Ps: Through 1-2-1 interviews and multi-disciplinary workshops we helped the team assess their services Pathways, Processes, Policy’s, operational Pain and future service development Plans.
- Diagnose: We visualised and discussed variation in individual clinic capacity utilisation and agreed the root cause of that variation.
- Plan: We facilitated agreement on the rules to be used to calculate the capacity of each clinic and applied these rules to confirm revised capacity targets.
- Monitor: We developed an OPD analytics dashboard which provides intuitive real time visualisations of forecasted and actual capacity utilisation as well as trends in DNAs, referral demand and waiting lists. The team were coached on how to run data driven action focused multidiscipline team meetings to monitor and action variation from targets.
Results
Improved utilisation of existing capacity resulted in a 32% increase in attendances.
The waiting list was at its lowest point in 4 years following 14 months of continuous improvement and counting.
A new referral triage process was adopted reducing referral backlogs and improved coding.
A future strategy of focusing on ANP clinics to review a broader set of patient complaints was agreed which will free up consultant capacity and increase the overall capacity of the service without further Consultant investment.
Testimonial
MedModus do not just implement a business intelligence platform. They help ensure we implement the management processes needed to drive sustained waiting list improvement underpinned by actionable analytics.