BLOOD SCIENCES
Putting patients at the heart of phlebotomy booking services
Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has transformed the service it offers to GPs and patients for phlebotomy appointments by deploying two key innovative technologies that make the whole process paperless.
The new services include an online scheduling and patient booking solution that allows patients to book phlebotomy appointments at a time and location that suits them and an app that enables the use of barcoded blood collection tubes, minimising errors relating to labelling. The entire process has been
transferred online, incorporating GP ordering, patient engagement,
scheduling and booking, clinic management and sample collection. This has the added advantage of providing accurate data/information relating to order status, capacity management and activity, including DNA management.
From drop-in to an appointed service Before the COVID-19 pandemic,
Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (WHH) phlebotomy operated as a drop-in service across multiple sites at Warrington and Runcorn Hospitals as well as delivering phlebotomy services to wards and various clinics and children’s outpatients. Patients would simply come to the phlebotomy room with a paper blood test request form from their GP. As explained by Neil Gaskell, Pathology Manager: “Typically, patients would come to phlebotomy first thing in the morning. There would be a long queue, and many would be unhappy about waiting for their test. With the pandemic, we had to initiate social distancing, so phlebotomy became an appointed service. Implementing appointment slots was a better service because when the patients arrived, they didn’t have to wait, they just came in for their appointment, had a quick test and left.”
One of the drivers behind the new service was the desire to move to pre-labelled blood tubes to reduce issues with handwriting and mislabelling.
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During the pandemic, phlebotomy test appointments were booked via the Trust call centre. This had a huge impact on the available infrastructure and call- centre staff as call volumes escalated. Patient complaints increased and a radical change of approach was needed. In addition, the Pathology Service was contacted by a GP practice that wanted to explore ways to reduce the burden of printed blood test request forms as part of a sustainability initiative. Meanwhile, the Blood Sciences Department was receiving high volumes of test request forms from GP practices with poor quality print. This, coupled with the use of specimen tubes that required manual labelling, caused operational issues, and impacted the quality of samples processed by the laboratory. Neil explains: “From a quality
improvement perspective, we wanted to SEPTEMBER 2024
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