The next (10) big things

No sooner are we into an historic third term, and the NHS is moving forward. There's a document hidden away on the NHS Modernisation Agency site here (pdf file, 489KB) called 10 High Impact Changes for Service Improvement and Delivery and for anyone working in the NHS or interested in the health service I recommend at least flicking through it.

All these 10 changes work, have been proved to work in at least one NHS organisation, if all the NHS did the same as the best practice in each of the 10 areas then:

Change No1: Treating day surgery (rather than inpatient surgery) as the norm for elective surgery could release nearly half a million inpatient bed days each year.

Change No2: Improving patient flow across the whole NHS by improving access to key diagnostic tests could save 25 million weeks of unnecessary patient waiting time.

Change No3: Managing variation in patient discharge, thereby reducing length of stay, could release 10% of total bed days for other activity.

Change No4: Managing variation in the patient admission process could cut the 70,000 operations cancelled each year for non-clinical reasons by 40%.

Change No5: Avoiding unnecessary follow-ups for patients and providing necessary follow-ups in the right care setting could save half a million appointments in just Orthopaedics, ENT, Opthalmology and Dermatology.

Change No6: Increasing the reliability of performing therapeutic interventions through a Care Bundle approach in critical care alone could release approximately 14,000 bed days by reducing length of stay.

Change No7: Applying a systematic approach to care for people with long-term conditions could prevent a quarter of a million emergency admissions to hospital.

Change No8: Improving patient access by reducing the number of queues could reduce the number of additional FFCEs required to hit elective access targets by 165,000.

Change No9: Optimising patient flow through service bottlenecks using process templates could free up to 15-20% of current capacity to address waiting times.

Change No10: Redesigning and extending roles in line with efficient patient pathways to attract and retain an effective workforce could free up more than 1,500 WTEs of GP/consultant time, creating 80,000 extra patient interactions per week.

Apologies for the excessive management-speak, but if you can cut through the jargon there's some terrific stuff here. I'm very excited to be working in the NHS right now, I'm sure that this isn't the last time I'll be talking about this project.