A herculean effort by Whittington Health NHS Trust staff has seen just over 5,500 local people come off waiting lists for planned care as part of “sprints” that saw additional clinics take place in the evenings and weekends across February and March.
Whittington Health NHS Trust staff have been pulling out all the stops in an effort to meet its target to treat at least 65% of patients who require planned care within 18 weeks. This has seen colleagues from across the Trust pulling together in a series of “sprints” during March.
Across the organisation this has resulted in the Trust’s in-house teams providing additional outpatient appointments, theatre lists and neurodevelopmental assessments for children and young people in Islington (where waits were the longest in North Central London) into the evenings and across weekends in February and March.
The results of this work show that all of this effort has paid off with the number of patients waiting over 52 weeks for planned care dropping from over 650 in December to fewer than 90 – most of whom will be seen during the final few days of March and then reflected in the figures.
In Children’s services, the priority waiting list2 for neurodevelopmental assessments in Islington (for conditions such as Autism or ADHD) has been eliminated totally, having sat at around 7 months previously. In total, 170 children received an assessment during a sprint. The overall waiting time for assessments saw three months shaved off. Islington CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) had the highest waiting time for Autism, ADHD and combined assessments across North Central London prior to the sprint.
In adult services over 600 have come off waiting lists for vascular surgery appointments, 800 people Neurology, and over 1,000 people fewer people now sit on waiting lists for general surgery and dermatology.
Whittington Health NHS Trust’s Chief Operating Officer Chinyama Okunuga praised the teams who made all of this additional care possible, she said: “In December only around half of our patients were getting the care they needed within 18-weeks, today that number is closer to three-quarters. Patients are at the heart of everything we do at Whittington Health so it wasn’t hard to persuade people to step up to meet this challenge, but I cannot praise my colleagues highly enough – from the booking teams, housekeepers and administrators behind the scenes to our porters, reception and clinical staff that patients see, everyone stepped up and said ‘let’s do this’”.
National targets state that 65% of patients should be seen and treated within 18 weeks of a referral. Whittington Health expects to end the financial year at around 70%.
Selina Douglas, Chief Executive of Whittington Health NHS Trust said: “Behind all of these figures are real people who are waiting for care they need, so it is vital that we do everything we can to treat them as quickly and safely as possible. If I am honest, when we told our colleagues at NHS England that we would get more than 5,000 extra patients treated by the end of the financial year, I don’t think they believed us – it just goes to show you should never underestimate Whittington Health!”
The trust is now focussed on sustaining these improvements into the new financial year and to continuing to cut waiting times for local people.
