All trusts are now facing huge increases in demand for services post-Covid, and in order to catch up with the backlogs, new activity plans and bed occupancy levels must be set to meet this unprecedented call for care.

But the usual spreadsheet-based, annual approach to planning will no longer work. Trusts now need agile, tactical plans for all their clinical services, to maximise the opportunity for elective surgery every week while running a safe service for emergencies.

With an expertise in modelling and forecasting, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust spotted this issue early. Old, outdated capacity plans could no longer work. New, responsive baselines must be put in place if a full elective recovery is to be funded and realised. They needed accurate data that could inform Board directors and senior managers and help with resource planning and utilisation on both strategic and tactical timescales.

Leeds chooses leading capacity planning experts Gooroo

Leeds chose to go with Gooroo, the leading experts and the premier provider of agile forecasting and capacity planning solutions on the market and now part of the Insource portfolio. The Trust will be implementing both Gooroo Planner and Gooroo Beds. And the automated data flows from the Insource data platform that feed the capacity planning software will allow the trust to see accurate waiting lists against each specialty, to protect clinical priorities and model along clinical pathways, so they have the vital data on hand to plan the future and respond to changes as demand shifts.

James Goodyear, Director of Strategy at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, stated,
“Gooroo expertise, and its Founder Rob Findlay, are well-recognised in the NHS from trusts to NHS England and the Royal Colleges. We needed a solution that was proven, and well researched, with state-of-the-art algorithms. We wanted to give the Board confidence that the strategy we were putting forward would deliver the targeted results. The Insource solution will give us access to near-live data feeds which means we can adjust our plans every week when we need to, or look six weeks or six months or six years ahead, to accurately meet our recovery targets.”

Rob Findlay will be working with Leeds to reveal the optimum bed occupancy rates that will deliver an acceptable risk of running out of beds and cancelling elective admissions. The trust can look at the medium-term and short-term statistics to adjust plans, inform senior managers, and deliver agile resource plans that support their elective recovery.