Using space more efficiently is saving money, as well as making things better for families and colleagues.
Determined to bring costs down and work more efficiently, the admin team from the East Sussex Children’s Integrated Therapy and Equipment Service at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust set up a new booking system for clinics and desk space.
Admin Operations Manager Edward Johns said: “We took a step back, to look at the issue with fresh eyes. We could see that we were not using our own space as best we could. Clinicians were booking rooms for nine hours, when they were possibly only seeing families for three or four. We could see we could have twice as many appointments in one room in a day and have clinicians sharing rooms, if we did things differently, including making sure colleagues had desk space when they needed to write up their notes.”
The new booking system means that rooms are no longer reserved for a whole day, when only needed for part of it. To set it up, Edward cross-referenced clinic times, clinician duties and annual leave. He also factored in ‘did not attend’ (DNA) rates, places where it seemed families were less keen to travel to appointments and when clinicians might be attending school visits. The changes are saving the team between £3,000 and £5,000 a month in room bookings as well as freeing up time and appointments.
Colleagues have welcomed the changes. One said: “It’s positive that admin are booking the rooms, as this lessens the workload for us.”
The quality improvement project was launched after Edward attended our QI Together programme, where he identified ways of reducing waste which would have a big impact. Describing the support from Sarah Donovan and Jo Healey in the QI Team as “fantastic”, he used several QI tools, including ‘plan do study act’ (PDSA), a driver diagram and a fishbone diagram.
The East Sussex Children’s Integrated Therapy and Equipment Service project on a page.