ENT Case Study

ENT Case Study: North West of England

Challenges

A large Trust in the North West of England was facing challenges to meet their demand within their ENT service and required support to help reduce their current backlogs. They required an insourcing solution to support their elective recovery plans and meet their patient demands which included 1st outpatient appointments, diagnostics and follow ups. This meant that those patients who had long wait times could be seen and treated for their condition without causing any further delay which potentially could cause long term effects to their overall health.

Delivery

YMS collaborated with the Trust in the North West of England to run a One Stop Clinic on weekends, as to prevent any unnecessary steps and repeated episodes of care in the patients journey, whilst also not affecting the day-to-day operations of the Trusts. The original ask was a weekend model for PTA’s which was a Consultant Led clinic with a Nurse and Audiologist. The service started in November 2023 and ran every weekend with a total of 4 rooms per day. This allowed for maximum capacity and a high throughput of patients without compromising on quality.

The Trust then identified an additional need for audiologists’ clinic to support with bottlenecks generated from the weekend clinics for more specialist audiology services such as vestibular assessments. The request was made and within a week YMS created additional capacity with 145 clinics being created and onboarded 8 additional audiologists to deliver the service. With the new model in place an average of 620 patients were seen per a month and 155 patients on average being seen per weekend. A range of diagnosis were carried out depending on the patients’ needs which included Hearing Aid Moulds and Fittings, PTA, VNG, BAHA, Tinnitus Management, Hearing Therapy, Paediatric Assessments, ECochG and OAE. YMS delivered weekly reports which also included outpatient conversion rates to aid the trust in appropriately planning diagnostic and theatre capacity to prevent any bottlenecks, as well as governance assurance data which included KPIs, patient feedback, quality metrics.

Results

The partnership with YMS allowed this trust to:

• Improve patient throughput and quality of care for First and Follow Up Outpatient appointments.
• Utilise their room and equipment downtimes at weekends
• Virtually eliminated their waiting lists
• Benefit from YMS's responsive and approachable approach, addressing concerns promptly and to the Trust’s satisfaction.
• Significant cost savings against national tariff

Service summary

• 3416 patients seen since the November 2023
• 262 patients DNA’d, 8% of patients booked. However, of those that did DNA, a desktop review was completed and moved all patients along in their pathway, so the time allocated for their appointment wasn’t wasted
• 725 patients were referred to imaging, 23% of patients seen
• 307 patients were referred for diagnostics, 10% of patients seen
• 158 patients were referred for surgery, 5% of patients seen
• 5 patients were referred for suspected cancer
• 56 patients were referred to another speciality, 2% of patients seen

1574 patients were discharged, which is an incredible 48% of patients

With the efficiency and delivery of the service YMS provided, the Trust confirmed the backlog was tackled a lot quicker than originally planned and the waiting lists was cleared in a total of 5 months. This cost saving for the Trust calculated to be around £68k against national NHS tariff.