Case Study

Four Eyes Insight were part of a team commissioned jointly by an NHS Trust in the South East of England, the regional ICS and NHSE to drive improvements across Cancer pathways.

Download the full case study here.

The Trust are a major provider of integrated hospital and community services caring for over half a million patients every year, with over 6,000 clinical staff.

With a goal to aid recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and increase compliance against Cancer operational standards, the programme of work spanned two phases. It was successfully delivered, resulting in improved compliance with cancer operational standards and a reduction in the waiting list backlog.

The Challenge: Declining Compliance against Cancer Operational Standard
Despite continued efforts to maintain cancer services during Covid-19, like others across the country, the Trust had seen a decline in compliance against national cancer operational standards.

As such, there was a need for external sector expertise to help identify opportunities to enhance cancer pathways, and ensure a thorough understanding the core capacity available to see cancer patients in the long term.

Our Approach
Phase one focussed on driving improvements to five core functions of the cancer service:

1. PTL management

2. Tumour pathways

3. Cancer workforce

4. Quality and governance

5. Booking and scheduling

Following detailed reviews of existing practises and processes within each workstream, interventions were implemented with both short and long-term benefits. In the short term, several quick wins were introduced to retain grip and control on cancer performance.

Following the work completed in phase one, it became apparent that a consistent and structured approach to Demand and Capacity modelling, with credible and reliable trajectories for each core cancer pathway was required.

During Phase two each tumour site was modelled from referral through to treatment, considering critical stages along the pathway including OPD (N+FU), diagnostics (Endoscopy and Radiology), theatres and MOPS.

The Results
Phase one saw improvements in the Trusts performance against cancer operational standards, with key highlights including:

– 15% increase in 2ww compliance

– 27% increase in 62-day compliance

– 24% and 12 % improvement were seen against the 31-day to first treatment and 28-day faster diagnosis respectively

As a whole, the programme of work undertaken by Four Eyes Insight provided the Trust with the evidence to support its service improvement methodologies and understand the variation between demand and capacity to be able to tackle inefficiencies. This has and will continue to support better decision-making, and increase compliance against cancer operational standards.

Partnering with the NHS to reduce the cancer backlog

Our mission is to find clinical efficiencies.
Four Eyes Insight uses the combined power of our people, data and technology to get to the root cause of elective care and cancer pathway inefficiencies. We implement interventions that enable the NHS to effectively use data to understand where improvements could be made for both immediate and long-lasting change.

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