Interactive case study map for elective recovery

Overview

To help NHS healthcare providers learn from each other and adapt initiatives to overcome their elective workforce challenges, NHS England’s elective workforce recovery team created an interactive map to allow easy navigation, identification and access to good practice and innovation happening across the country.

What the organisation faced

As a direct consequence of the pandemic, many patients are waiting longer for the treatments they need. This means there is a need for more planned hospital activity for the longest-waiting patients across elective care and cancer, in line with the delivery plan for tackling the COVID-19 backlog of elective care.

The elective workforce recovery team is part of NHS England’s workforce, training and education directorate. The team supports the delivery of the elements of the national elective recovery strategy that relate to the NHS’s workforce, primarily aligned to three large programme areas: surgical, diagnostic, and outpatient transformation.

An integral part of the team’s work is to engage with regional and trust leads, and the team came across a lot of improvement initiatives and workforce innovations across the priority elective recovery programmes that they recognised would be useful to share more widely.

Improvement

The team knows that when it comes to improvements and policies in the NHS there is no one-size-fits all solution, as there are different regional challenges, demographics, and capacity. With this in mind, the team created an interactive case study map so that regions and trusts can learn from each other and adapt the initiatives to suit their own needs and challenges. The case studies are short and snappy, with contact details and further resources should the reader want more information, recognising that this enables productive conversations between regions and trusts, at their pace and when they have time. The team is continuously adding further case studies and sharing this nationally, contributing to the growth of a network for improvement and supporting the spread of innovation and learning, by giving the information back to the system through a colourful, manageable, and interactive map on the FuturesNHS platform.

Outcome

The team has received a lot of positive feedback from stakeholders who are happy that their story/initiative is being shared. Many would also like to follow up in a few months to update their case studies with the latest results. One of the areas the team is looking into is initiatives supporting operating department practitioners (ODP), following recent staff survey results showing several trusts with a significant improvement in ODP engagement and morale scores. The team has contacted this group of trusts to explore what, if any, initiatives are behind this positive change.

Lessons learned

• Once the process was set up and tested, it has worked well in capturing the necessary information for the case studies.
• Everyone is also happy to share and are even more happy to do so if it does not entail a lot of extra work, i.e., if they had to draft a lengthy case study themselves.
• It is important to manage the expectations around the time commitment for the case studies and to make it clear that most of the work would be completed by us.