EcoNWL011 NHS NWL ICB Theatres Productivity Accelerator Support

NHS North West London ("NHS NW London") Integrated Care Board ("ICB") has secured a range of resources to provide support for immediate improvement in theatre productivity and ongoing support for improvement cycles beyond this project.

WL ICB is facing significant challenges:

• Providers are not able to meet rising demand and costs significantly exceed the available envelope.

To meet this challenge, NWL ICB is undertaking several productivity acceleration efforts. One key opportunity and priority for NWL ICB is theatre productivity across Trusts.

In November, BCG supported NWL ICB by analysing theatre productivity of LNWH and ICHT. In this effort, two key challenges were identified:

• Session scheduling (which does not sufficiently take workforce capacity and resilience into account, creating inefficiencies); and
• in-session productivity (touchtime utilisation for ICHT and patients per session for both ICHT and LNWH).

The effort also identified three (3) short-term opportunities:

1. Deliver a higher proportion of sessions;
2. increase the number of patients per session; and
3. improve in-session productivity.

This will lead to more reliability, predictability, and stability - improving experience for both patients and staff and increasing the total number of patients treated.

NWL ICB now wants to deliver against these opportunities with speed. This will require further analyses to identify the optimal number of sessions; engagement and change management; best practice sharing; and the development of workforce initiatives to support scaling of resilient planning.

NWL ICB also seeks to roll-out key elements of this approach to Chelsea & Westminster Hospital and Hillingdon Hospital in addition to LNWH and ICHT.

Deliverables from this work (two main outcomes):

1. Immediate improvement in theatre productivity; and
2. Ongoing improvement cycles beyond the project.