Envoy Trust Messenger - Secondary Care

ROYAL BERKSHIRE NHS FOUNDATION TRUST USES PATIENTXT MESSAGING SERVICE AND REDUCES DNA RATES BY OVER 17%

 

Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust provides the full range of general hospital specialities on an outpatient, day or inpatient basis. It has 813 beds including maternity, neonatal and intensive care beds and employs around 4,000 staff. It aims to provide excellent services to Reading, Wokingham and West Berkshire community. It provides approximately 400,000 outpatient appointments a year.

 

Challenge:

To improve the quality of service for patients and to improve its DNA (Do Not Attends) rate, still considered to be a drain on the Trust’s resources, both human and monetary. The major problem with any Out-Patient scenario is the length of time between a patient booking an appointment and the appointment itself and as such,the major reason given for patients missing their appointment is that they forgot. A DNA not only wastes resources but exacerbates the problem of increasing waiting lists.

 

Solution:

The Trust decided to implement a text message appointment reminder system and performed an evaluation of various suppliers. Healthcare Communications were chosen as their Patientxt systems had proven reliable and cost effective in other areas of the Trust with the company displaying an impressive level of market experience.

 

5 Month Pilot Results:

 

DNA reduction, Oncology Department - 100.56%

DNA reduction, Rheumatology Department - 53.44%

 

 

DNA rates reduced so dramatically during the 5 month trial the appointment reminder system was integrated in to a further 23 departments.

 

A project team was set up to manage the implementation, in line with the plan provided by the Healthcare Communications team. The project manager phased the project in to selected sites over a 4 month period. This was a major contribution to the smooth roll out to all 25 departments.

 

Combined DNA rates fell by 17% with  Mobile number capture jumping to 36.8%. 

 

 

Conclusion

A combination of excellent project management, trust teamwork and service has produced excellent trust-wide DNA rate reductions. Some departments offer larger DNA rate reductions than others, on the whole the system has proven an effective patient communication tool. The product has performed reliably throughout the contract term, with the Healthcare Communication team providing continued support when required.

 

 

Trust Feedback

“The project has been extremely successful. Healthcare Communications delivers its services courteously and responsively through its well informed staff who take an obvious pride in what they do and in the service they provide. There was an immediate impact on our DNA rates during the short pilot but we have since consolidated this with DNA rates reducing in all departments. This represents a considerable saving in both resource and finance and the patient feedback has been extremely positive. We have always been extremely happy with the excellent support provided by Healthcare Communications, both technical and customer service. Any issues or queries have been dealt with in a consistently prompt and efficient manner.”

 

Neil Dowdell, Procurement Manager,

Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust

 

Healthcare Feedback

“Royal Berkshire is a great example of how to successfully project manage a system implementation. The stakeholder group worked with us throughout the plan, completing the processes and successfully rolling the system out Trust wide. The success was in no little part due to effective project management from committed members of staff who took real ownership of all matters including mobile gathering and marketing. The managed roll out to groups of departments ensured any problems encountered could be addressed quickly, lessons learned and not repeated! The trust has recently renewed the contract for the services with Patientxt continuing to deliver value.”

 

Mike Cunningham Director

Healthcare Communications

 

Contact:

Healthcare Communications UK Ltd

Stratum House

Chester Street

Stockport

SK3 OAS

0161 429 4151 mcunningham@healthcomm.co.uk