Archipelago works with South Central Ambulance Service
Archipelago Healthcare Ltd have recently completed work with South Central Ambulance Service NHS Trust’s Non-Emergency Patient Transport Service which provides pre-arranged transportation for patients to and from their hospital appointments and often between healthcare settings, such as one hospital to another. This service operates in an open market in which the service competes against other providers, often private companies, for contracts with hospitals.
Patient Transport Services for the Northern SCAS area of operations were consolidated at Northern House Bicester in order to achieve better economies of scale and synergies. The control room struggled to get off the ground and in August 2009 call waiting times for wards and practices booking journeys were excessive. By Spring data suggested that some improvements had occurred but call volumes were as high as 800 per day and abandonment rate was at 30%. Staff were demoralised and stressed.
Archipelago were commissioned by the Manager of PTS with support from the Director of Transformation, principally to address the pressure being placed upon the control room (call volumes and abandonment rate), although as the three day operational diagnostic illustrated these statistics were symptomatic of operational problems on the ground particularly at transport operations bases. For this reason Archipelago widened the scope of the task and instigated measures to affect the wider operation.
Archipelago orchestrated a staff meeting and prepared leaders to appeal to staff to permit a rapid change to shift patterns. The staff gave unanimous consent when they heard the presentation of the Archipelago diagnostic. Actions taken were numerous and selected on the basis of the ease with which they could be completed and their impact on the operation (although it in the event, some actions which should have been straight forward i.e. the activation of agent and application displays that would allow supervisors to balance demand and capacity in the control room took weeks due to scarce IT / telecoms engineering support).
Archipelago worked alongside staff to deliver changes in many key areas of the operation, a selection of these include:
• Adjustments to Contact Centre 6 system – transition to single logon, dynamic switching, live application (lines) and agent displays (staff) that allowed supervisors to manage the control room.
• Adjustments to Cleric – use of SMS messaging, use of cancellation pop-ups, development of failure logging, use of vehicle capacity layout features to name a few.
• The development of a optimised planning process for Oxon and Bucks calculated to reduce mistakes.
• Support to supervisor recruitment using specially designed competencies and competency based interviewing. Supervisor training in objective setting and appraisal, control room management.
• Instigation of transport operations managers meetings to address short comings in bases (i.e. management of: mobile phones, vehicle service schedules, rota management).
• Instigation of a pilot to extend the use of the On-line Booking System to capture increasing percentages of bookings on-line.
• Set up arrangements for regular data delivery and analysis to give staff an awareness of and excitement at their progress.
The results were pleaseing for us and most importantly for the client:
• Crew Lines – Although average calls offered to these lines were increased by 50% over the period to 285 per day (Calls relating to ‘same day journey cancellations’ and crew calls previously handled using mobile phones (approx 100 per day) were redirected to the Day Control Team), however through other interventions capacity was created within Day Control to handle this. In spite of the increased volumes, abandonment rate was reduced by 63% to just from 30% to just 11%.
• Hospital Line – Average calls offered decreased by 49% over the period from 560 to 284 call per day. Abandonment rate reduced from 35% to 10.25%.
• Abort rate fell well below industry norms and was as low as 6% in April for journeys related to the Oxford PCT (focus for the intervention).
• In July 2010, on the busiest application (line) (Future Bookings and General Enquires) the average answer delay was 2 mins and 56 seconds (1 minute of that time is taken up with the message)
• 94% (2850) of calls to line 4 were answered within just 5 mins
• 6% (168) of calls were answered after 5 mins
There is still a long way to go, but the service has made significant strides forward in partnership with Archipelago.