Leeds Teaching Hospitals boosts patient experience and hospital productivity, as 92% of departments go live with digital appointments in six months
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT) is one of the largest UK acute hospital trusts, treating 1.5 million patients across 7 hospitals annually.
As part of the Trust’s post-pandemic Operational Transformation, and with the successful implementation of a modern call centre solution, Outpatient Transformation is one of the key strands. The Trust needed a modern, efficient and sustainable digital solution that would improve interactions — by creating more capacity for patient self-service — provide a better patient experience and optimise productivity.
Managing 5,000 outpatient letter templates across seven hospitals was extremely challenging. Audit and governance were difficult, errors caused delays or sent patients home, and training for new employees was time-consuming. LTHT needed a solution to reduce the time to manage, print and mail appointment letters as well as the associated costs.
Manual record keeping and query resolution was cumbersome, with back office teams left frustrated as they managed, communicated and rearranged patient appointments. By streamlining and digitising these processes, LTHT could boost efficiency and reduce errors, whilst also allowing for colleagues to undertake more patient-focused work. Plus, delayed letters and a shortage of real-time information meant clinicians were unable to easily respond to changes — leading to workarounds and even double bookings.
“It was a partnership that we worked with Netcall. They were on every call with us, they were at the Board with us, they’ve done everything on the NHS App with us. They really helped us deploy at scale so we’re up to about 92% of services now.”
Rob Child
Programme Manager (Outpatient CSU), Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
Digital patient uptake via Patient Hub was fundamental to increasing staff capacity and cutting costs – benefitting colleagues across all specialties and freeing them up to deliver value-add elective recovery work. The new developments for Patient Hub to help manage specific patient groups will allow LTHT to increase coverage. Tailored digital letters enabled easy inclusion of speciality paragraphs, that are simple to view, edit and update. Trust-wide updates, such as for directors, can be made in real-time. Information governance and auditing are improved.
By releasing staff from relentless processing, Patient Hub is empowering teams while delivering significant cost savings and sustainability benefits. And clinics are running at optimum capacity, thanks to reduced Did Not Attends and the ability to flexibly manage change.
92%
of specialties with clinics
in Patient Hub
6 Months
to go live with
digital appointments
88%
less manual processing
See how Patient Hub can increase staff capacity and cut costs, benefitting colleagues across all specialties and freeing them up to deliver value-add elective recovery work.
Missed appointments have costly impacts on a Trust. Relying on postal services was no longer enough for patients or Chesterfield Royal Hospital – they wanted an online portal which a patient can use to check and manage their appointment.
‘Did Not Attend’ (DNA) rates are a problem for many hospitals and NHS Trusts. The Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust DNA rate was 7.6% for new patients and 8.9% for follow-ups.
