Mutual aid front and central in plan to eliminate 78-week waits

MUTUAL aid between all three of our trusts – instrumental in virtually eradicating the 104-week waiting list at the end of June – is to be stepped up this year as we focus on repeating this success by aiming to eliminate 78-week waiters.

By making best use of our collective capacity in this way, no fewer than 120 potential 104-week waiters received faster treatment between November 2021 and February 2022 alone.

As part of our elective recovery plan for 2022/23, clinical and management colleagues are working together to identify new opportunities in a raft of specialties, and then promote uptake.

One priority area is inpatient orthopaedics. This is a challenged specialty for South East London, with all Trusts experiencing pressures but for different parts of the service.

Trusts have agreed to the principle of transferring long waiters from Guy’s and St Thomas’ and Lewisham and Greenwich to King’s to be treated at Orpington Hospital. This will also release capacity at Guy’s and St Thomas’ so it can support the transfer of complex patients from King’s Denmark Hill site.

This forms just one strand of our plan to move an ever-increasing number of patients between trusts to support equalisation of waiting times, and eliminating all waits over 78 weeks by the end of March 2023.

It also includes a strong focus on how we are maximising use of our green capacity at Orpington, Queen Mary’s at Sidcup, and in the independent sector to ensure it is used in a way which will deliver greatest gain for system position and the patients of South East London.

It will build on our achievements over the past 12 months. By working together differently, we have:

• Delivered our objective of eliminating 104-week waiters by the end of June (with the exception of just three patients) - down from nearly 200 in January. It is now our ambition to maintain this position throughout 2022/23.
• Broken new ground with the scale and pace of coordinating and unlocking access to capacity across the independent sector. We transferred 1,800 patients there last year and up to 2,150 transfers are planned for 2022/23. Lewisham and Greenwich has taken most advantage of this extra capacity, particularly in the specialties of trauma and orthopaedics; hands and pain; and general surgery and gynaecology.