As the targets to eliminate long waiters get harder, how can operational managers know if they are really on track to succeed? Rob Findlay investigates.
Are you on track for the elective waiting list target?
It’s a question that reverberates weekly from the top of the NHS to the bottom. How do you answer it?
If you want to say ‘yes’, then the popular and simple cohort tracking approach is your friend, because it paints a picture that is somewhat rosier than the truth.
But what if you really want to know? Then you need to be cleverer.
Responsive forecasting
You are forecasting an uncertain future, and things happen, so you need to be bang up to date with your analysis. And it isn’t just about the long-waiting cohort, because the whole waiting list participates in the pathway management and booking processes and affects whether you can reach your target.
Those two deceptively straightforward sentences define what you need in surprising detail.
‘Bang up to date’ means your analysis needs to be refreshed every week, which means it needs to be automated and integrated into your normal business intelligence. It also requires proper forecasting, because any approach that relies on an average of the last several months or year will be too slow to respond to events. And it must compare against what is actually happening, so you can easily see in simple charts whether you are on track for success and, if not, what you need to do about it.
Whole waiting list
‘Whole waiting list’ means both the size and shape of the list. If there is a bulge of patients working up the cohorts, then it must be accounted for. Your waiting list might be too large to achieve the target safely, in which case you need to know how much of the effort is waiting list initiative and how much is recurring activity. Or patients might not be coming in in the right order, in which case the waiting list will be the wrong shape which is a scheduling issue not a capacity issue. Sometimes, both will apply. You need to know.
And this is where the Tactical edition of Gooroo Planner comes in. It delivers exactly that.
Gooroo Planner Tactical runs automatically behind the scenes while you are asleep. It is fed with accurate data by the Insource data management platform. It is the most advanced demand and capacity model available, with advanced forecasting built-in. And the results are delivered to your usual business intelligence system, where we even provide code and support to get it all working properly.
Operational planning
No planning system can be ‘plug and play’ in the NHS, because every local specialty has its quirks. In orthopaedics, that means fracture clinics and joint injections. In ophthalmology, it’s second eyes and eye casualty. So Gooroo Planner Tactical has a full support package attached, to engage every operational division and reflect how their real-life clinical pathways differ from how their data is presented in PAS/EPR.
This is a different kind of planning, a generation ahead of the traditional annual spreadsheets. This is planning as a utility – business as usual planning. It is getting the big things right, and then making continual little course corrections to land inside the target at year end. And it has the pedigree of many years’ experience across the NHS and internationally, clinical support, and national recognition.
Click here to get in touch, and we will be delighted to show how Gooroo Planner – Tactical edition can help you succeed at the next waiting times targets.
