T­riage time gamechanger

The challenge

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is one largest, busiest acute hospital trusts in the UK and one of Europe’s largest teaching hospitals. The Trust is highly regarded in the world of clinical research, it also aims to be a leader shaping the digital future of the NHS.

Two new hospitals are planned – a brand new adult hospital and a world class new Leeds Children’s Hospital. The Trust is already investing wisely to move to digital solutions which help patients and staff, and is committed to keeping the patient experience at the heart of everything.

Technology to grow with the Trust

The Patient Administration System (PAS) was being updated to give all teams more flexibility to meet the patient and staff needs but the Trust wanted to enable more ways for patients to engage digitally with clinical services, whilst protecting those patients without access to digital technology. Their contact centre solution was reaching capacity, so the Trust migrated to the latest cloud-based Liberty Converse solution – our omnichannel contact centre.

“Liberty lets us have a Triage Team that filters our incoming calls. We find that about 60% of our patients just want to amend a booking, so we action it there and then, and we only forward a call to specialist teams if it needs specific clinical expertise.”

Richard Moyes

General Manager of Outpatients, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

The solution

The result

• Starting with appointments in the Referral and Booking Service, delivering over 1.3 million outpatient appointments each year
• The cloud-based Converse solution freed up infrastructure to be used elsewhere
• Soft phones were introduced, replacing landlines, enabling work-from-anywhere flexibility
• Resilience, governance and business continuity were built in
• Business Support Managers’ office shows all activity on Converse, so they can ensure efficiencies and position colleagues to meet fluctuating demand
• Call handling triage means that patients are not waiting long on the lines and fewer calls need to be passed to the medical teams
• The callback function prevents patients hanging on the line
• GP’s calls can be routed straight through

“We want our workforce to be digitally empowered and to provide a good experience for staff and patients, using IT which just works. Moving to Converse has been a gamechanger for us – it’s been absolutely amazing.”

Richard Moyes

General Manager of Outpatients, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

A digital future

Every step Leeds makes contributes to how they will work in their new ‘Hospitals of the Future’. They are focussed on making their systems work well for patients and staff straight away as well as putting the foundations in place for a digital future.