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“Achieving the ambitions reiterated in the Hewitt Review, and creating the conditions for ICS success will require sustained commitment from all partners across the health and care system and we at NHS England are committed to playing our part.”

Steve Russell, Chief Delivery Officer and National Director for Vaccinations and Screening, NHS England.

Essentially, The Hewitt Review advises how Integrated Care Systems should be run to create a more sustainable NHS.

The case for change: The Hewitt Review

With an end goal of preventing ill health and improving NHS productivity, the main objective of the review was to evaluate how to best enable integrated care systems (ICSs) to succeed by balancing greater autonomy and robust accountability.

Identifying six key standards for change, the review recommended the following principles that will support the long-term sustainability of the NHS and its patients:

1. 1: Collaboration between systems and national bodies, treating each other as partners with complementary and interdependent roles and creating mutual accountability.
2. 2: A limited number of shared priorities that provides local leaders with flexibility about how they apply priorities to their local circumstances.
3. 3: Give local leaders space and time to lead by avoiding adding new targets and initiatives that make it hard to plan, while wasting valuable NHS resources.
4. 4: Systems need the right support, with ICSs needing whole system support, rather than individual providers or sectors.
5. 5: Balancing freedom with accountability between authorities, local government and systems, including a new role for CQC as the independent reviewer of ICSs as a system.
6. 6: Enabling timely, relevant, high-quality and transparent data essential for integration, improvement, innovation and accountability.

Examples of change: Acute Provider Collaboratives

“We’re seeing Acute Provider Collaboratives crop up across the country, some seem to be working well, however, some seem to find it a struggle, which is understandable. It will be difficult for NHS Trusts to step up to the plate and start collaborating, as they’ve spent the past 20 – 30 years in a highly competitive survival mode.” Explains Brian Wells, Founder of Four Eyes Insight.

Like ICSs and ICBs, Acute Provider Collaboratives (APC) are designed to improve efficiency, sustainability and care for patients by combining several Trusts to work alongside each other, providing many similarities to the Hewitt Review and moving towards increased collaboration and autonomy for organisations.

Towards the end of last year, NHS Confederation invited provider collaborative leaders to respond to a survey on the development of their collaboratives, with an interesting 70% of respondents highlighting that they still consider themselves in the early stages of set-up.

Although it seems positive relationships are being established between APCs and ICBs, working in co-operation rather than a ‘top-down’ model, as suggested in the Hewitt Review, the main challenges faced are around workforce and resourcing and the time it will take to set up collaboratives properly.

One of the key principles in the Hewitt Review is to give local leaders space and time to lead by avoiding adding new targets and initiatives that make it hard to plan. This is crucial to the success of these collaborations between providers, ICBs and ICSs –creating new targets every few months will do more damage than good, leading to diminishing patient experiences and access to healthcare.

Compelling Narrative: Maximising Patient Safety

Demand and access to healthcare services often outstrip available resources within elective care. Four Eyes Insight’s recent work with an APC in South England shows that organisations working together can provide system-wide capacity, improve productivity and maximise patient safety.

Supporting the establishment of an Elective Hub with the APC, we’ve identified that when fully operational, the Hub will significantly impact the high-volume demand and capacity gap, and release capacity for more complex surgical activity in specialist sites including ENT and Urology.

An estimated overall capacity increase of approximately 4500 -5100 additional surgical day cases per year could be achieved – providing the collaboration of services is developed and maintained.

Having a compelling narrative for APCs, ICSs and ICBs should be at the heart of these collaborations, without them teams would lack direction, engagement, and affect morale.

Last month, HSJ released an article highlighting that NHS England is returning to payment by results (PbR) despite strong opposition from some of the service’s largest trusts. Continue reading Elective Recovery Fund: Feasible or Flawed? →

“Bringing together the skills and expertise of staff under one roof will ensure we keep pace with future demand and rapidly reduce waiting times, getting patients access to vital procedures when and where they need them.”

Health and Social Care Secretary Steve Barclay

In this latest instalment of our Elective Hubs blog series, we look at the dynamics that can make these centres highly effective.

Previously we spoke about when setting up or transforming an elective hub, what is its purpose? In addition to the critical aspect of treating patients quickly, efficiently and safely, there must be a focus on the mission of the hub.

As Four Eyes Insight Founder, Brian Wells explains, “productivity is key to an elective hub’s existence, therefore seeking every way to deliver care in the most effective and efficient way should be central to its ethos.”

Wells, who spent six years as Managing Director of the South West London Orthopaedic Centre (SWLEOC) and then moved on to Director of Orthopedics at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust has gained much experience and understanding of the complexities around elective hubs and ring-fenced elective pathways.

It is this experience that led to the notion that creating an effective ethos can make a significant difference to elective hubs, highlighted in the following eight key elements:

1. 1: Create dedicated clinical and operational teams who are masters at their skills and competencies, to create stability, “we’ve seen that elective hubs can easily lose staff quickly due to the pressures on the acute trusts – staff get pulled into other sites and there is no stability for the staff or the hub.” Wells highlights.

2. 2: Have dedicated and accountable senior clinical and managerial leadership with strong governance processes that monitor and measure detailed quality and performance KPIs closely.

3. 3: Be on a mission to be best in class on clinical outcomes, providing great training and, critically, delivering high levels of productivity, “to be world-class you need to be looking at, monitoring and pursuing new ways of doing things. Think about what the future of the service should look like. Are you looking at developing and modernising your pathways to meet them? Where does digital come into play and AI? These are all important elements that have a role to play in the future of the NHS – moving into a flexible, digital world.”

4. 4: Standardise clinical pathways and protocols that safely allow the wider clinical team to extend their roles and skills. “If standardisation becomes a philosophy, everybody then knows what they’re doing and staff will understand how to make the service work productively, efficiently and above all – safely.”

5. 5: View standardisation as a great philosophy then every effort to standardise the clinical pathways is expected and pursued.

6. 6: Pilot, test and advance new ways of achieving higher levels of productivity, such as HVLC lists, Superlists and High-Performance lists, with an ambition to go beyond historic levels of performance.

7. 7: Measure the outcomes of what the elective hubs do, monitoring and reflecting on these outcomes to perfect the clinical approach and pathways.

8. 8: Acknowledge incentive schemes to reward efforts beyond BAU performance, if this is done in the correct way, incentives can be a real enabler for the whole team and service.

Elective hubs can make a huge difference to the NHS in reducing the elective care backlog. With the right level of ambition and expectation, providers can take them beyond the performance levels of an acute setting where services face daily complex challenges from emergency pressures. Wells concludes, “all staff need to invest in a vision to be the best of class, seeking opportunities to refine and advance their input to the mission. To do this the NHS need to coach and train the workforce on what it really means to deliver high levels of productivity safely and with positive patient outcomes, by sharing emerging best practices for high performance and then developing their services through an accountable improvement programme.”

Contact us today to learn more about our work with Elective Hubs

About Brian Wells

Brian is a Founder of Four Eyes Insight who trained as a Registered Nurse in the Army specialising in theatres and anaesthetics.

Following a long clinical career, he went on to hold senior management posts in the NHS including, Managing Director of SWLEOC (a centre of excellence in elective orthopaedic care), and Director of Orthopaedics at Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust where he provided senior leadership with a focus on clinical productivity, process standardisation and operational grip and control.

Connect with Brian on LinkedIn.

An estimated 780,000 more patients in England will benefit from additional surgeries and outpatient appointments by 2024, according to NHS England, thanks mainly due to Elective or Surgical Hubs.

Recently, Brian Wells, Founder of Four Eyes Insight hosted a webinar, discussing if Elective Hubs could help ease NHS winter pressures, in response to the NHS setting out steps to rapidly boost capacity and resilience prior to the current winter pressures.  A main element of the webinar was to examine the challenges faced by elective hubs.

Elective hubs, whether stand-alone or integrated, ring-fenced or part of acute capacity; are predominantly dedicated elective services that focus on a narrower cohort of low-complex elective procedures treated through highly productive clinical pathways. The emphasis here is achieving higher levels of productivity than would be seen within an acute service, where clinical complexity and emergency pressures can directly impact throughput along the elective pathways.

Within the healthcare system, demand and access often exceed available resources, but this has been seriously compounded by the considerable impact on elective pathways from the recent pandemic.

There are approximately 90 elective hubs across England suitable to treat over 60% of patients currently waiting for surgery, an opportunity acknowledged by NHSE South East which has a number of elective hubs and dedicated ring-fenced elective pathways established on its patch. Therefore, assurance that these elective hubs or dedicated ring-fenced elective pathways were being used to their full potential was critical to the region’s elective recovery plans.

Elective hubs should achieve higher levels of productivity through a mission to target patients requiring lower complex procedures treated through consistent and standardised pathways where each element of the patient’s treatment is predictable and efficiently planned. However, that isn’t necessarily the case, as Brian Wells explains:

“What we’re seeing in the data coming out of these surgical hubs is that they are struggling to achieve the high levels of productivity that is possible. There are the usual signs of operational challenges inherent within elective pathways such as under-scheduled operating lists, start delays and cancellations, but there are several cross-cutting themes that have emerged that need to be addressed if the ambitions for high performance are to be met. These themes include;

– A need for dedicated leadership with the ambition and capacity to transform the pathways for high performance,

– Having a dynamic workforce plan designed to deliver higher productivity. Moving beyond the standard guidance for the traditional operating lists of ‘one after the other’ but towards HVLC, Superlisting and HIT listing, where dynamic flow planning allows for parallel activities from enhanced teams that increases in-list utilisation and productivity and reduces downtime.

– Achieving a cultural shift towards productivity through a compelling narrative that effectively engages clinicians and secures buy-in to the principles of high-volume operating lists, and,

– The complete adoption of the core principles for optimising elective pathways as business as usual.”

Following the success of the Elective Recovery Support Programme completed in partnership with the region, Four Eyes Insight was invited to complete a programme of work that included assessing if these elective hubs or dedicated ring-fenced elective pathways were planned or being used to their full potential.

The programme had a significant impact in several areas, with highlights including the trialling of a ‘super list’ ahead of further rollout, the completion of a series of best practice workshops to facilitate the upskilling of staff in best practice processes to maximise elective capacity, and the completion of analytical scenario modelling and delivery targets set to meet productivity expectations.

“Ever since I started Four Eyes Insight back in 2014, I’ve been involved in supporting elective services. We know the exemplars, such as SWLEOC and now hubs across NHSE South East are looking to gear up their capabilities with those exemplars in their sights. Can elective hubs make a difference? Absolutely they can, As stakeholders gain a greater understanding of the things that make the difference and focus on those themes that are challenging progress we’ll see the hubs rebound and deliver”.

About Brian Wells

Brian is a Founder of Four Eyes Insight who trained as a Registered Nurse in the Army specialising in theatres and anaesthetics.

Following a long clinical career, he went on to hold senior management posts in the NHS including, Managing Director of SWLEOC (a centre of excellence in elective orthopaedic care), and Director of Orthopaedics at Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust where he provided senior leadership with a focus on clinical productivity, process standardisation and operational grip and control. Brian led the development of the national theatre productivity methodology and analysis and continues to advise on high-performance elective transformation.

Connect with Brian on LinkedIn.

We recently caught up with Four Eyes Insight Senior Consultant and Cancer Specialist, Claire Hopley to learn more about the cancer backlog and what it means for the NHS.

Having worked in clinical and operational roles at Trust level and within a Cancer Alliance, Claire brings a wealth of knowledge to the Four Eyes Insight Team.

Tell us about your work in the NHS and how you came to be at Four Eyes Insight?

I have worked in the NHS for the last 16 years in clinical and operational roles, focussing most recently on quality and service improvement. I have worked closely with both clinical and non-clinical teams to execute national and local delivery plans.

These transformational programmes have included; improving theatre productivity, reducing delays for patients in adult inpatient wards, early diagnosis and faster diagnosis of cancer.

Working at Four Eyes Insight allows me to fully utilise my skills and gives me a variety of projects that I enjoy working on.

What is your take on the current scrutiny around cancer backlogs?

The indirect consequences of the pandemic include delayed diagnosis of cancer, deferred tests and treatment delay.

Cancer backlogs relate to the patients referred for suspected cancer who are awaiting diagnosis. Given that access to diagnostics was challenging pre-pandemic due to increased demand, since covid this has increased further as more patients are coming forward that had previously delayed seeking help. It is very important that we reduce these backlogs as soon as possible to prevent later stage diagnosis, and ensure every patient receives a timely diagnosis so they can start treatment as soon as possible if it is required.

Delayed diagnosis and treatment can impact a person in many ways, it can affect their mental health whilst they are waiting for an outcome, they can experience worsening symptoms or progression of the disease, which could lead to treatment being less successful, they may experience more severe side effects, or the treatment may become palliative rather than curative. This all has an impact on their quality of life as well as their clinical outcomes.

Coming from a cancer alliance, what changes would you recommend to start to alleviate the backlog?

Given my experience working in acute Trusts and coming from a Cancer Alliance, I have a strategic and operational understanding of the pressures the system is under to restore services for cancer patients.

Four Eyes Insight are experts in improving productivity in healthcare and works in partnership with many NHS organisations to address capacity issues and improve patient experience, therefore they are perfectly placed to support organisations to devise and implement ways to reduce backlogs and ensure patients receive the timely care they need.

To find out more about the work Four Eyes Insight does in helping reduce the Cancer Backlog, take a look at our latest Case Study: Driving Compliance Against Cancer Standards.

The NHS has set out steps to rapidly boost capacity and resilience ahead of the busy 2022 winter period while progressing the 2022/23 Operational Priorities and delivering the Elective Recovery Plan.

In addition to planning for autumn/winter, the next steps include the need to increase capacity and operational resilience in urgent and emergency care, with core objectives and key actions, including:

1 – Preparing for variants of COVID-19 and respiratory challenges, including an integrated COVID-19 and flu vaccination programme.

2 – Increasing capacity outside acute trusts, including the scaling up of additional roles in primary care and releasing annual funding to support mental health through the winter

3 – Increasing resilience in NHS 111 and 999 services, through increasing the number of call handlers to 4.8k in 111 and 2.5k in 999.

4 – Target Category 2 response times and ambulance handover delays, including improved utilisation of urgent community response and rapid response services, the new digital intelligent routing platform, and direct support to the most challenged trusts.

5 – Reducing crowding in A&E departments and target the longest waits in ED, through improving use of the NHS directory of services, and increasing provision of same day emergency care and acute frailty services.

6 – Reducing hospital occupancy, through increasing capacity by the equivalent of at least 7,000 general and acute beds, through a mix of new physical beds, virtual wards, and improvements elsewhere in the pathway.

7 – Ensuring timely discharge, across acute, mental health, and community settings, by working with social care partners and implementing the 10 best practice interventions through the ‘100 day challenge’.

8 – Providing better support for people at home, including the scaling up of virtual wards and additional support for High-Intensity Users with complex needs.

With a heavy focus on Urgent and Emergency care, what can Elective and planned care providers do to relieve pressures?

Can Elective Hubs make a difference this winter?

In order to help manage pressure across the planned care pathway and support an improved flow of patients, elective hubs allow utilisation of the existing estate to the maximum enabling benefit, focusing on clearing backlog at a system level (GIRFT)

For the NHS, meeting the 78-week elective waiting time expectations by the end of March 2023 is a significant challenge and although NHS trusts have been reducing very long waits and improving productivity, providers are understandably juggling the capacity to support urgent and cancer care that directly impacts elective recovery.

Therefore, healthcare systems should expect more from their elective hubs and ring-fenced elective pathways this winter to help ease the pressure.

How can Four Eyes Insight support?

As providers continue to work to the elective recovery plan, Four Eyes Insight can support elective centres and ring-fenced pathways in becoming the hubs for High Volume-Low Complexity (HVLC) delivery. Day case units rarely reached higher levels of productivity even before the pandemic, so a focus on those operational factors that, when done well, move the dial on productivity and deliver more is crucial to elective recovery and easing the pressure during the winter months.

Using the combined power of people, data and technology to get to the root cause of NHS elective care pathway inefficiencies; Four Eyes Insight work collaboratively with all organizational stakeholders. We implement interventions that optimise elective care pathways and provide tools to monitor their effectiveness ensuring that a culture of continuous improvement to drive long term, sustainable change is embedded along the way.

To learn more about how Four Eyes Insight can support your organisation please contact us.

Introduced into the NHS in 2019, the 6-4-2 model is an improvement process, by which surgical staff:

– declare their annual leave six weeks in advance of their surgery schedule

– arrange their surgical lists four weeks before for sign off and;

– review their plans two weeks ahead of the surgery lists being ‘locked down’.

According to the NHS improvement hub, Productive Operating Theatre, the 6-4-2 model supports theatre teams to work more effectively together; to improve the quality of patient experience, the safety and outcomes of surgical services, the effective use of theatre time and overall staff experience.

Lead Associate of the NHS’ Productive Operating Theatre, Amanda Fegan, said;

“At the Productive Operating Theatre visioning sessions, scheduling, and more specifically, over-running lists are consistently highlighted as one of the three biggest barriers to achieving the teams’ vision of the perfect operating list.”

This followed a report commissioned by NHS Improvement (NHSI), ‘Operating theatres: opportunities to reduce waiting lists, that found theatres regularly lost time due to late starts, early finishes, and delays between operations, prompting the regulator and NHSI to recommend hospitals adopt a simpler model of scheduling surgeries and booking holidays.

The 6-4-2 scheduling model, used in theatre departments across the country, provides a universal approach to replace unclear, inconsistent and disparate processes. Supported by the NHSI Productive Operating Theatre guide, 6-4-2 enables theatre teams to be more productive and efficient at work, whilst providing individuals with a practical approach to understanding theatre scheduling systems and processes; supporting teams to identify where improvements can be made to deliver a reliable and achievable list.

The NHSI model below also explores the benefits and outcomes of having a scheduling system in place and what this means for patient experience, safety and reliability of care, team performance, staff wellbeing and value and efficiency.

In support of the 6-4-2 model, the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) tool helps NHS trusts deliver quality and productivity improvements for patients across many surgical specialities. It has shown that putting clinicians and clinical leadership at the heart of any change process is vital to realising real and sustainable improvements.

But, at times of escalation, planning in this way is often deprioritised. During the Covid-19 pandemic, theatres across the country moved away from the 6-4-2 model in order to be reactive to staffing schedules changing daily, the increasingly high volume of surgical cases and the evolving Covid-19 guidance for healthcare providers. post-pandemic it has been reported that NHS England data featured in a BBC article shows that there is a 12% lower operation carried than the year before the pandemic. Outpatient clinics, which include minor procedures, tests and assessments, are down by 5% to just over one million a month on average.

According to the article, the struggle to return services to full strength is why the backlog is growing because the number of new referrals for treatment has not actually gone up above its average before the start of the pandemic.

Following the pandemic, Four Eyes Insight worked with Cardiff & Vale University Health Board to improve the patient experience by implementing an efficient 6-4-2 scheduling process for theatre sessions, supporting the reduction of the post-pandemic backlog.

“The main challenge for us was how we conducted 6-4-2 and the scheduling process. When Four Eyes Insight came on board with us they spent time understanding the challenges facing us and worked very hard to help launch Task and Finish Groups and worked alongside the team. They looked at the team’s capacity and capability, increasing our team’s establishment to ensure lists can be booked further in advance.” Paul Bracegirdle, Interim Deputy General Manager,  Perioperative Care.

Senior Consultant and Delivery Lead at Four Eyes Insight, Sarah Nolasco said:

“We worked with the theatre managers to ensure they had a good process in place following the pandemic, obviously many things have changed during that period of time, and like many hospitals, they have had to find new ways of doing things. The key to this was supporting their 6-4-2 scheduling process to ensure they have the clinicians to cover the lists and are able to use the resources they have effectively.”

Implementing an effective theatre scheduling process is a critical part of organising how an operating theatre department runs. For teams getting to grips with scheduling, this can make the difference between a well organised, efficient and effective department and disarray and increased stress for the teams involved.

To find out more about how Four Eyes Insight can help your NHS theatre team improve its patient experience and take advantage of the efficiencies that the 6-4-2 scheduling process can offer, contact our team of experts at info@foureyesinsight.com

The NHS has recently introduced its 100-day discharge challenge with a focus to improve the patient discharge process to “release much-needed capacity within acute providers”.

The letter from Sir David Sloman, Chief Operating Officer of NHS England stated;

‘The aim of the 100-day challenge is to improve the current position around discharge and ensure that we are in the best possible position ahead of winter.’

The National Health and Social Care Discharge Taskforce has identified ten best practice initiatives that it hopes will be adopted across the NHS, as part of the ‘100-day challenge’. These include:

1. 1. Identify patients needing complex discharge support early
2. 2. Ensure multidisciplinary engagement in the early discharge plan
3. 3. Set an expected date of discharge (EDD), and discharge within 48 hours of admission
4. 4. Ensuring consistency of process, personnel and documentation in ward rounds
5. 5. Apply seven-day working to enable discharge of patients during weekends
6. 6. Treat delayed discharge as a potential harm event
7. 7. Streamline operation of transfer of care hubs
8. 8. Develop demand/capacity modelling for local and community systems
9. 9. Manage workforce capacity in the community and social care settings to better match predicted patterns in demand for care and any surges
10. 10. Revise intermediate care strategies to optimise recovery and rehabilitation

The letter asks “that all system and provider leadership teams ensure there is a focused executive and clinical leadership from medical, nursing and allied health professional colleagues. There should also be consistent and appropriate oversight of discharge performance from trust boards and ICBs.”

In support of the initiative, Four Eyes Insight can bring assurance, robust governance and improved productivity across the core clinical areas of the patient pathway, enabling responsive patient care without delays.

To help address the NHS Priorities for 2022 to develop the workforce required to deliver multidisciplinary care including supporting the rollout of virtual wards and discharge, Four Eyes Insight is helping to reduce DTOCs and the current backlog by providing the tools to monitor NHS trusts effectiveness, ensuring that a culture of continuous improvement to drive long term, sustainable change is embedded along the way.

From when the patient is seen to when they have been discharged post-surgery our approach looks at every step, so if you would like to hear more, contact our experts at If you would like to find out more or discuss your requirements, please email info@foureyesinsight.com.

‘The time has come to re-evaluate the purpose of outpatient care and align those objectives with modern-day living and expectations.’ – NHS England Medical Director, Professor Stephen Powis.

In 2018, The Royal College of Physicians article, Outpatients: the future stated the NHS receives over 118 million outpatient appointments every year – many of them are unnecessary. In 2022 that number continues to rise, with the demand for hospital treatment exceeding capacity before COVID-19, it comes as no surprise that the need to deliver care during a pandemic has led to significant backlogs and longer waits for patients.

Moving forward, a recent article published by the NHS, Outpatient Model suggests ‘we must focus capacity on those with the most urgent needs and those who have been waiting a long time for care, making the best use of valuable staff time and resources. With this, each provider has been asked to reduce outpatient follow-up appointments by a minimum of 25% by March 2023 – going further where possible, to re-allocate time to prioritise activities to support elective recovery.

As operational productivity experts, with extensive clinical experience, our process is designed to seek out long-term value for patients, the population and the environment – transforming the performance of our health service with measurable and sustainable results, not just ahead of March 2023 but for the future.

It’s our mission to implement interventions that optimise elective care pathways and provide tools to monitor their effectiveness, ensuring that a culture of continuous improvement to drive long-term, sustainable change is embedded along the way.

To achieve a sustained reduction in unnecessary outpatients requires a core operation for good practices as a foundation for broader change. Using our framework, we aim to support your team with the tools needed to reduce those unnecessary appointments, backlogs and increase efficiency with measurable results.

Here’s how:

Data-Driven Analysis

The first step in our process is to undertake a deep dive into your data to assess your current situation. This includes undergoing an in-depth analysis using our Business Intelligence (BI) model to identify problem areas as well as opportunities to increase productivity and efficiency with immediate effect. Our recommendations are always validated by our expert team of consultants who work together with your team on the ground.

The BI analysis is followed by optimised scheduling, which looks at performance at a macro and micro level. We can get as granular as assessing the productivity of a particular clinic code, or a particular clinician within the team and identifying areas of opportunities within their specific field.

Let’s begin the Implementation

Following the completion of our analysis, we would report the findings and discuss our implementation phase, which is managed by our experienced clinical and operational delivery leads working hands-on with staff to share their knowledge and expertise.

In order to build bespoke patient pathways and devise a business plan model to reduce those unnecessary appointments and did not attend (DNA), our team would design bespoke services for your particular needs. At Four Eyes Insight we aim to target and tackle any operational issues and blockers preventing required productivity improvements.

We do this by, implementing a structured Patient-Initiated Follow-up PIFU plan for patients with long or short-term conditions in a broad range of specialties. This plan enables the patients and their carers to get the flexibility to arrange their follow-up appointments as and when they need them – with the incentive to empower patients and their carers to manage their own decisions in line with the NHS personalised care agenda; driving down unnecessary follow-up appointments.

In addition to this, a crucial pillar outlined in the Principles and approach to delivering a personalised outpatient model is to deliver a personalised outpatient model that better meets the individual patient needs and improves the quality of care and patient outcomes.

Here we would look to develop your analytics, through a clinical review and validation of OPFU waiting lists, supporting your team with re-purposing clinical time from appointments that were clinically beneficial to do so.

Not forgetting the additional areas we would look to optimise, including, increasing utilisation and throughput the reduction of DNA’s as well as coordinating diagnostic test results to streamline pathways and minimise appointment cancellations.

Time to Change

It is important to adopt a robust change management strategy to understand the impact of immediate wins agreed upon during the analysis. Practical tools and techniques deployed using our BI model will begin to shape and change the future of reporting on your team’s efficiency. This approach helps to provide a pace and strengthen operational grip with the overall aim to improve appointments and eradicate unnecessary ones.

The speed of our programmes is designed to maximise the annual effect and establish efficient and robust changes to the current process – with clinical and administrative teams working collaboratively to provide direction and focus.

Monitor the results

Following the implementation process, we will continue to offer arms-length support through remote monitoring of performance.

Our team of experts will monitor and support using Four Eyes Insight’s ‘in-session’ productivity approach, to highlight performance and progress, benchmarking this against the established efficiency improvement targets, resulting in your team being able to see month-on-month a reduction in unnecessary appointments.

Using Four Eyes Insight’s proven processes and applications will help to translate the significant efficiencies which will translate into a sustainable reality.

Sustainable Change

Our main focus, working in line with a Greener NHS  is to create technology-led data processes which lead to sustainable changes that last. Whether it’s through our custom-designed capacity management solutions or a light touch continuous service. Four Eyes Insight strives to provide continued support for operational improvements and help your team with reducing unnecessary outpatient appointments in the future.

Interested in hearing more?

At Four Eyes Insight, we have seen first-hand the power that our work has had on improving elective recovery. We do this by the combined the power of people, data and technology to get to the root cause of NHS elective care pathway inefficiencies; working collaboratively and engaging with all stakeholders to get buy-in for change from the ground up. If you would like to find out more or discuss your requirements, please email info@foureyesinsight.com

Reduce waiting lists with intelligent software

Our software helps organisations reduce waiting lists by maximising elective theatre utilisation and enhancing the patient scheduling process.

Designed by clinicians for clinicians, our theatre software modules offer an innovative web-based platform for monitoring and improving the productivity of your elective theatre pathway.

Maximising theatre utilisation

Our elective theatre software supports utilisation planning and reporting for the benefit of patients and surgical teams.

With pressures to reduce 52-week waits and the significant elective patient backlog, NHS managers and staff require simple, accurate and informative planning and reporting software.

Our software ensures organisations can maximise precious theatre resources whilst providing high-quality patient care.

About Four Eyes Insight

We use the combined power of people, data and technology to get to the root cause of elective care pathway inefficiencies; Four Eyes Insight supports all NHS organisations involved in the delivery of care and can help to:

• – Achieve high performance
• – Optimise elective care pathways
• – Monitor performance
• – Sustain and improve the pathway

What we offer

With a wealth of experience across the elective care pathway, underpinned by our intuitive software, Four Eyes Insight offers a wide range of tailored programmes and support to bring robust governance and improved productivity across many core clinical areas.

Download our Theatre Performance & Forecasting Software brochure here, to learn more about how we can help with the Elective Recovery for the NHS.