WWL is a major acute Trust serving the people of Wigan and its neighbouring boroughs. Its aim is to continuously improve the services and facilities it offers patients, with a dedication to providing the best possible healthcare for the local population – over 300,000 people. By promoting analytics at the heart if the organisation, the Trust is ensuring high standards in the delivery of patient care. A large focus for the Trust was therefore improving its A&E services. Winter pressures on A&E departments across England show no signs of diminishing year-on-year and the NHS is under increasing pressure to drive efficiencies while cutting costs. WWL’s Executives and Business Intelligence team therefore needed to find a way to save costs and improve patient care. They decided to do this by encouraging an analytics culture, putting technology into the hands of hospital staff at the point of decision and empowering them to be very much part of the process. They enabled them to use data to see the whole story, identify patterns, take action and make decisions that matter. Qlik’s interactive analytics help to build trust in a way that static reporting cannot.
The Trust has created an application that provides live A&E intelligence to all staff – doctors, nurses, clinicians and the board, giving a greater understanding of where patients are in their journey through the hospital - improving discharge levels, reducing delays and minimising re-admissions. With this insight, the Trust can also plan for both long-term and short-term staffing as well as presenting a current view of the A&E department and the areas surrounding it that affect patient flow. The visual management and alerts mechanisms provided by the application help to ensure patients are prioritised in the right order, meaning WWL has reduced its median length of stay in A&E by thirty minutes.
To make the application visible and usable to all staff across the Trust – as well as patients and the public, a large 70” touchscreen has been installed in A&E. Amongst other key information, the dashboard displays the number of patients due through the door and proportion that are likely to need a bed. It also shows patient acuity and their historic admissions information to give a greater understanding of their likely recovery time, helping to prevent capacity issues. “The dashboard is easily accessible as well as easy to understand and use,” said Dr. Stephen Gulliford, A&E Consultant, WWL. “It allows a clear, visible, real-time update of the situation across the Trust at any given time - from unscheduled care through to the provision/adjustment of appropriate workforce and resources to meet the demand.”
“Over the last few years, the Trust has produced a number of insightful, yet intuitive, QlikView apps that have helped changed both the culture of the organisation and the perception of data. Data is no longer seen as just a way to monitor what’s happened yesterday but is now appreciated and seen as a key commodity in helping with pressures faced both today and the future. Our journey and app development started in finance but now we now have a large range of QlikView apps which support our Clinical Services and their delivery of safe, effective care. Each app has been designed and developed in conjunction with our staff and clinicians to ensure they remain relevant to their work and healthcare. As the majority of the apps contain real-time intelligence, users can reflect and get answers to their questions there and then,” said Mark Singleton, Head of Business Intelligence. “Some of the most significant apps have been so successful they have been recognised at a national level, winning awards such as Health Service Journal, EHI and HFMA.”
“Knowing how many patients are likely to be admitted provides the Trust with a forward look on bed availability and flags potential capacity issues in the days or weeks to come, something very pertinent to the financial challenges the NHS is facing with reductions in Acute beds,” said Rob Forster, Director of Finance & IM&T and Deputy CEO, WWL. “All those who have seen the application – from our own staff to visitors such as NHS England, the media and a Member of Parliament – have commented that they haven’t seen such sophisticated software in this environment and that’s why we strongly believe it is cutting edge innovation within healthcare. We are incredibly proud that it’s been produced by us: an NHS Trust with just NHS employees, but we are even more proud of the difference it has made to our services and local population, helping WWL to become one of the best performing A&E departments in the country.”
Chief Executive, Andrew Foster, is delighted with the range of excellent visual management tools which have been developed by WWL staff on the Qlik platform. “I am so impressed by these sophisticated, easy to use systems that I have a giant screen in my office to look at them. It is mostly set to the A&E monitoring system so that I can see at a glance, how we are doing right now and what we expect to happen in the coming hours. It’s like having a ‘weather station’ in my office. And then there is so much more available, literally at my fingertips – past performance by day, month and quarter; productivity by consultant; progress with CIPs and much, much more. We live in the age of information and it is great to see our very talented local Business Intelligence department using Qlik to create these best of breed, real-time management systems.”
“NHS Foundation Trusts nationwide are under constant pressure to drive efficiencies while cutting costs. WWL has shown that giving staff access to data and empowering them to actually bring about change will get the best out of them,” said David Bolton, Director, Public Sector & Healthcare, Qlik. “Reducing A&E waiting times to become one of the top performing departments in the country is an incredible feat – and truly shows the power of putting data analysis at the heart of the culture and in the hands of all staff. We’re thrilled to have helped the Trust achieve something that can, ultimately, help save lives – and look forward to working with them even more in the future to continue to help them gain data-driven life-saving insights.”
