This month, we take you behind the scenes to show you some of the work being done by a team that plays an important role in helping us to manage our waiting lists. We sat down with Simon Hellier, Deputy Patient Access Manager in our Northern Services, to find out more about what he and his colleagues across the Trust do.

What does the patient access team do?

There are a few different teams within the patient access team, and we work across Devon, but we are all focused on ensuring that our Trust sees patients as quickly as possible and they are booked equitably for appointments based on their clinical priority and waiting time. Our team helps to keep track of roughly 75,000 patients who are currently waiting to start treatment with the Royal Devon.

We group together all the waiting lists, appointments and diagnostics relating to a specific condition, which enables us to track each patient’s total waiting time and current treatment status (e.g. treated, not yet treated, no treatment required). If you ever hear someone talk about what waiting time you could expect, the number they give you is based on the information that we’ve worked on.

What does an average day look like?

With 75,000 patients to keep track of, and more patients being added every day, you can imagine that we are kept very busy! The patient access team helps to ensure we have recorded information correctly and accurately, the Trust is adhering to policies, and patients progress in their care as quickly as possible. It involves looking at a lot of data and talking to staff across the Trust, and talking to patients too.

It can be quite complex to keep track of everything. There are tens of thousands of interactions every week across multiple different teams that we need to ensure are recorded correctly. Many patients will have been referred to us for more than one condition and a single patient may have multiple appointments with us before they agree a treatment plan with their clinician.

We also provide training and advice to management teams on how to apply policies and ensure all staff have the knowledge needed to help us track and report patients’ waiting times accurately.

How does the team support patients on waiting lists?

There are different roles within the patient access team.

We have Pathway Validators who review each patient’s clinical notes, waiting lists and appointments to check that all the information we have about them has been recorded correctly and the patient is on the correct waiting list (or lists) at the right level of priority.

Our Patient Access Co-ordinators closely monitor any patients who have been waiting particularly long and try to secure an appointment or admission for treatment for them. To do this, they have to keep track of everything that needs to be in place to make that appointment or admission happen.

The Mutual Aid Team works with other hospitals/treatment centres to offer our longest waiting patients an alternative option so they can be treated sooner. Not every patient will take up the offer, but it’s important that we make sure patients know what options they have.

Is there anything else you’d like people to know about the team?

The NHS measures how long patients are waiting for treatment once they’ve been referred for specialist care from a consultant – patients are added to a Referral to Treatment (RTT) pathway, and it’s the number of patients on these pathways that you’ll see reported in the news. We are all acutely aware of how important this is for people, on an individual level, in our local communities, and even more broadly in terms of what the country expects from the NHS.

It is vital these pathways are appropriately managed and tracked to ensure that patients are treated as quickly as possible and appropriately prioritized, and I’m proud to be part of a team doing something so important for patients.