NHS

In June 2004, part of Britain’s Labour Government’s improvement plans for the National Health Service was the promise to reduce waiting times within Accident and Emergency departments. A plan was developed by the Department of Health; the key targets were as follows:

·          By December 2004 no emergency patient was to spend more than four hours from arrival to admission.

·          By 2005 maximum waiting time for any inpatient treatment should be no more than six months.

·          By 2008 the maximum waiting time for any inpatient treatment should be no more than three months.

·          An overall reduction in the amount of cancelled operations.

The challenge was that health trusts and their hospitals were already struggling with a wide range of initiatives and ‘Making best use of beds’ had to be delivered rapidly to impact the measurement of waiting times which was scheduled for December 2004. Hence, our solution needed to be designed, developed and deployed in less than six months in order to enable trusts to use the approach in the last four months of 2004.

The key requirements were for Capita to:

·          help to collate and identify the key content and materials to include in the ‘bed management’ learning resources;

·          develop the key learning into a series of workshops, providing a pack of materials to allow the NHS to run the workshops, and

·          produce e-learning materials to include in the existing Capita e-learning environment.