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Health projects commended at national awards

April 28, 2011

Two of NHS Bolton’s projects have been highly commended at the national Advancing Healthcare Awards.

Productive Community Services (PCS), which helped teams across the organisation become more efficient, and a project to cut waiting lists for neurology clinics were shortlisted for the awards, which aim to recognise and reward health projects.

PCS is an organisation-wide change programme, which aims to help frontline teams improve their quality and productivity. It has been identified by the Department of Health as a key tool to support organisations in delivering efficiencies.

The programme has reduced the time spent in discussions and interruptions about patients by 52% from 465 minutes a week to 255 minutes a week and helped the intermediate care at home team increase time spent with patients from 21% to 35% - releasing an extra 40 hours a week to deliver patient care.

The team, led by Anna Troughton, introduced PCS in 2009 in collaboration with the NHS Institute, and were runners-up for the ‘Chief health professions officer’s award for leadership (England)’.

The aim of the programme was to engage staff in improvement activity, developing their leadership, and quality improvement knowledge and skills.

In February 2010, the programme was rolled out in other areas and there are now 55 teams working on PCS, including adult speech and language therapy, the wheelchair service, district nursing, paediatric therapy team and school nursing.

The judges praised the project for demonstrating good recognition of inter-professional challenges and a good personal leadership style.

Anna Troughton, Occupational Therapist and Quality Improvement Facilitator at NHS Bolton, said: “It’s great to be shortlisted for the award. I’m hugely proud of what we’ve achieved and we’re continuing to find new ways of improving services.”

Also praised was a new method of service delivery for patients with long-term neurological conditions, which has cut the waiting lists for neurology consultants’ clinics from three years to just 10 weeks.

The success was achieved by NHS Bolton’s Janet Priest, Team Leader, and Mandy Wardle, Deputy Team Leader, who were runners-up for the ‘Rethinking the patient care pathway’ award.

In 2008, NHS Bolton started a project to reduce delays for neurology follow-up appointments.

A new purpose-built community centre was built where all the members of the team could be based to integrate the specialist neurology team with the primary care rehabilitation services.

The key component of the service is case management, which is provided by either specialist nurses – for conditions such as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, or occupational therapy for brain injury – and the most suitable allied health professional for any other neurological condition depending on patient need.

This means users and carers can make rapid contact with an appropriate member of the team and consultant appointments are reduced to being on a medical need basis.

One of the major successes of the service is the close working with the user and carers groups. This input has been so beneficial that they have representatives on the steering group, have designed direction leaflets and had a large input into any patient information leaflets that the team produces.

Patient satisfaction questionnaires of their overall experience have shown that 66.7% of patients were very satisfied, and 33.3% satisfied with the service.

The project demonstrated that integrating two teams in one location and getting allied health professionals working with nurses can make a big difference to waiting lists, said the judges.

Janet Priest, Team Leader, said: “It’s great to be recognised in this way. We started with a huge task on our hands but now have waiting lists down to an acceptable level. And we’re working hard all the time to make the service better for patients.”