Improving capacity, reducing wait times and forming a data driven culture
Challenge
Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust (MSE) was navigating an increasingly challenging operational and financial landscape. The Trust faced significant cost pressures that demanded smarter, more efficient ways of working. Ensuring seamless patient flow and effective capacity management across the three hospital sites was becoming a critical imperative, yet the existing processes were strained under the daily demand. MSE needed a fundamental shift to not only maintain standards of care but to also build a sustainable operational model for the future, one that could alleviate pressure on the dedicated staff and ensure resources were utilized to their fullest potential.
Solution
The Trust implemented TeleTracking’s Operations IQ Platform to support patient transfers and hospital throughput at the three main sites.
Initiated a Change Management Board in 2023 that included:
Operational leaders, clinicians and IT application administrators.
Agreed upon outcomes to focus on for a set duration of time.
Established an emergency care improvement pillar to improve emergency flow and performance.
Enhanced the quality and visibility of information between shift/ward teams to promote continuity.
Improved whiteboard content providing better visibility of patient care needs at ward level.
Nursing services collaborated to produce a set of patient attributes for care, mental health, medically optimized and discharge pathways.
Piloted TeleTracking portering system for ED patient moves.
Leveraged TeleTracking’s data and analytics solution for live and interactive performance dashboards, creating situational awareness and highlighting patient flow barriers.
Results
With focused efforts on patient flow optimization, Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust has achieved the following over 2 years:
Improved operational use of data and dashboards forming a data driven culture.
Better support of care delivery with whiteboard content review on wards.
44,273 portering jobs per month completed on average in 21 minutes.
Impact of improvement in ED and internal (ward to ward) patient bed assignment to bed occupied time:
19,728 operational hours/capacity reclaimed.
Improvement in the occupied timer has prevented an additional 80 patients from delayed ambulance offloads.
Impact of improved quality of information to the clinical site team:
Reduction to median LOS by 0.19 day.
Upward trend in number of discharges by hour across the 3 sites.
Reduction in phone calls to validate information about the patient.
Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust Overview
Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust serves 1.2m people in mid Essex, southeast Essex, and southwest Essex. MSE provides a range of acute healthcare services from three main hospital sites at Broomfield, Basildon, and Southend, including urgent and emergency care, planned care including elective surgery, diagnostic testing, outpatient services and maternity services.
As well as the main hospital sites, MSE also provides services from other smaller sites, such as Orsett Hospital, the St Andrews Centre in Billericay which provides x-ray and blood testing facilities, and Braintree Community Hospital where elective orthopedic surgery is carried out.
Having real time visibility of capacity has been fantastic, there has been a definite reduction in the time it now takes to allocate and transfer the right patient to the right bed, it has not only improved timely flow across the site but has also enabled an ability to forward plan and meet demand.
Michelle Baxter, Head of Patient Flow – Broomfield Hospital, Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust
