Theatre efficiency
motivated in their place of work, opportunities to improve efficiency in surgeries and on wards are far more limited.
Concerns about the wellbeing of the NHS
workforce have been reported by organisations, such as NHS Confederation, who have raised the alarm that staff in the system are increasingly overwhelmed and overworked. It is widely known that the pandemic put every worker in the NHS under immense amounts of pressure, and understandably these extreme conditions have taken a toll, as the data reflects. Surveys have shown that 99% of Trust leaders
are concerned about the level of burnout among their workforce10
, and one assessment even
suggested that staff working with patients with COVID-19 were 70% more likely to develop both acute and post-traumatic stress disorder or to suffer from psychological distress.11 Retention of the existing workforce is becoming an increasing worry for the system. A University of Bath study, published in February 2023, revealed that more frontline NHS staff have been trying to leave the health service in recent months than at the height of the pandemic.12
It is therefore imperative
that we take care of the staff that take care of us. Creating new ways of working and valuing every member of the team has the potential to raise the spirits of the workforce. This can be done through initiatives such as multidisciplinary teams, where members share skills and understand the basics of each step in the patient pathway. This would allow them to improve efficiency by discussing and sharing their experiences in the operating theatre, designing the most productive ways of working through the exchange of lived experiences with patients. No less important are initiatives that seek
to train the NHS staff into the most efficient areas of working. As the participants in our roundtable highlighted, the NHS should undertake a strategic review of training and development needs for NHS staff working in elective care departments, outlining programmes which can be supported by industry partners. For this to be effective, healthcare management and industry must work together to design and create tools with healthcare professionals in mind and integrate these into training programmes across hospitals. In this respect, we can offer a wide range of informative resources on our Online Education Hub that are easily accessible to the staff working in Trusts across the whole country. This on-demand, learning platform includes webinars, eLearning modules, and clinical
September 2023 I
www.clinicalservicesjournal.com 29
Simple, innovative initiatives can play a key role in helping to improve care and deliver efficiencies
evidence plus the latest information on best practices, technologies and therapies, with a particular focus on the most efficient ways of working based on the recommendations of key surgical leaders.
Recommendations As it has been laid out, the plan to bring the NHS elective care list to its pre-pandemic status requires a holistic range of solutions, which interlink to each other. If Trusts want to reduce waiting lists and address the backlog in elective care, they will have to look into different areas, each of them key to a different aspect of the healthcare system. However, efforts on this will fail if they do not examine the development of new patient pathways, the deployment of innovation and the overall improvement of the staff’s morale and training. With these factors in mind, we have compiled a list of key recommendations that we believe would greatly improve performance in the field of efficiency, in turn thus greatly helping in tackling the backlog. These include:
Versius® Uniquely small and modular.
We set out to create a surgical robot that is more accessible through its design.
Hospitals can maximise their use of Versius as the small and modular system can easily be moved between virtually any operating room, no matter the size.
t
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