Developing a consistent and clear view of demand and capacity for planned care

When Edge Health was asked in July 2017 to support an NHS Trust that had entered special measures in 2015, there was no consistent or clear view on what needed to be done to improve their RTT position. We offered to help them create a single, agreed analysis of their planned care demand and capacity that could be acted upon.

Faced with large quantities of data, often coded differently in different parts of the organisation, individuals had lost confidence in analysis and decisions were being made on the basis of intuition. We met with clinical and operational staff from across the organisation to understand their challenges and we worked intensively with the data team to iron out the inconsistencies and reach a single version of the truth. We pulled together a baseline view of bed and theatre usage by specialty and site and we worked closely with the specialty leads and with the theatre team to understand the potential opportunities to improve capacity usage; it was clear that staff needed to work differently and pathways needed realignment before theatre productivity could be improved.

Our work is supporting the trust to plan its future bed and theatre requirement. And we solved the initial problem: we now have senior stakeholder agreement on major questions relating to the need for investment, capacity and cross-site pathway coordination.