Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has boosted theatre productivity with support from a new digital tool. The Care Coordination Solution (CCS), part of the NHS Federated Data Platform, has helped maximise the utilisation of available theatre time, so patients can receive care sooner.
Introduced as part of a broader operating theatre improvement programme the tool supported, between April and December 2024, an additional 232 patients to be seen. This equated to a 3.7% increase compared to the same period in 2023. By viewing the implementation of NHS FDP as an improvement project they were able to make quick progress and saw a 5% rise in the number of theatre sessions scheduled.
The team at Chesterfield Royal adopted the platform as part of a broader initiative to improve their theatre utilisation, improve outcomes, and help clinicians and administrative staff optimise theatre usage and overall care coordination.
In the Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) speciality, the technology played a particularly helpful role in supporting the team’s improvement efforts, with the team successfully reducing theatre list overruns whilst increasing the number of patients treated.
In the six months before these improvements, 78% of lists exceeded their scheduled finish time by an average of 56 minutes but now, only 14% of theatre lists exceed the finish time by more than 10 mins. The average number of cases for an all-day list has also increased from 2.8 to 3.5, with 50% of lists now accommodating 4 or more patients.
Lee Alexander, Improvement Programme Lead at Chesterfield Royal Hospital, said, “What we’ve started to do is use the information that the CCS provides to work with local theatre list teams. Their experience of what it’s like on a given day, coupled with that really rich and insightful data, truly opens up the opportunity to change how we work.”
The CCS is now established and plays an important role in scheduling, viewing and planning for upcoming lists, whilst also providing insight which is supporting further improvement discussions.
Although this initial phase of work has delivered numerous benefits, it has also revealed even greater potential for the platform to be extended to support forthcoming improvement efforts. The team at Chesterfield will continue to scale and maximise the benefits of this initial phase, while exploring new possibilities for future implementation.
Dr Jon Cort, Executive Chief Digital Officer and Consultant in Anaesthetics and Intensive Care Medicine at Chesterfield Royal Hospital, said: “I really believe we can, and will, expand the use of NHS Federated Data Platform products to give our patients the very best care. Right now, we’re bringing on board a lot of our anaesthetists, who have found the CCS to be an absolute goldmine for planning their workflow.”
“The benefits to patients are clear: By getting more cases done per list, we’re actively cutting down our waiting lists for elective care.”