How Surgical Hubs can help tackle NHS backlogs under the new UK Government plan
Access to these could see patients able to access more appointments closer to home and get the treatment they need faster, the Government say. Increasing the number of surgical hubs will, they say, help protect planned care from the impact of seasonal and other pressures.
Under Plan for Change, 14 new surgical hubs will be created within existing hospitals by June and three others expanded - with more expected in coming years.
Surgical hubs have been factoring in the Government’s thinking for several months.
When the most recent budget was announced in the Autumn, it included a pledge of £1.57bn for new surgical hubs and diagnostic equipment. The funding forms part of an overall promise to increase the number of NHS hospital appointments and procedures in England by 40,000 a week, or two million a year. That £1.57bn was for capital investment to spend on buildings or equipment in the next financial year – including surgical hubs.
And surgical hubs are indeed the ideal way to increase surgical capacity, Their use can help offer hundreds of thousands more patients quicker access to some of the most common procedures.
With a focus mainly on providing ‘high volume low complexity’ surgery with particular emphasis on ophthalmology, general surgery, trauma and orthopaedics (including spinal surgery), gynaecology, ear nose and throat, and urology, they are ideally positioned to help reduce the backlog in these essential areas of patient care, those most likely to affect the most people.
And the good news is, there are different solutions which can be deployed quickly to create these new Hubs using existing construction or infrastructure options.
Vanguard Healthcare Solutions has successfully created surgical hubs with Trusts across the country using modular buildings, or mixed modality solutions (a combination of mobile healthcare spaces coupled with modular buildings) to create high quality clinical spaces designed to drive down waiting times.
Mobile healthcare spaces can also be used ‘standalone’ for an even more quickly deployed option. Using a combination of mobile ward and clinic spaces combined with mobile operating theatres, including laminar flow (these mobile facilities can be easily and speedily linked together and to the existing hospital infrastructure to create a seamless patient pathway), surgical hubs suitable for a variety of procedures can be speedily created.
At South Warwickshire University NHS FT, a highly efficient Vanguard-constructed surgical hub, with a mobile theatre at its core, has been instrumental in helping minimising waits and has helped the Trust achieve incredible results.
In its first 12 months, more than 1,000 procedures were performed in the Surgical Hub, including more than 900 joint replacements. Mutual aid was provided to four nearby Trusts and over 12 months, the increase in orthopaedic procedures reduced waiting times dramatically and powered SWFT's rise from 18th to 6th best trust for RTT performance.
And to help it further increase the number of patients the hospital is able to see and treat, Milton Keynes University Hospital used a Vanguard Surgical Hub to create a Day Case Unit.
The new unit complemented a number of successful initiatives the Trust was already running including Super Paediatric Surgery Days – providing dedicated days for paediatric surgery, and the introduction of High Volume Low Complexity lists, where more patients can be treated over a shorter space of time.
The Surgical Hub Day Case Unit used a Vanguard mobile theatre which housed both a day case theatre and a dedicated short-stay recovery ward, ensuring patients could be seen and treated in the same location, on the same day.
Again, the results this Hub have helped the Trust achieve are impressive. The Vanguard facility enables the Trust to perform a range of day case, general surgery operations as well as some dental, urology and gynaecology procedures. The proficiency of the clinical team, also supplied by Vanguard, contributes further to this flexibility, allowing the Trust to react to the most pressing need.
Within three months of opening, more than 330 procedures had been performed in the Hub. The additional capacity allowed for greater flexibility in the main hospital theatres and the overall waiting list was reduced by around 600, including 554 long waiters.
Surgical Hubs focused on ophthalmic procedures have also been created by Vanguard for Trusts in England including the hugely successful Newcastle Westgate Cataract Centre which treats around 1000 patients a month. The improved patient flow offered by the surgical hub has seen times spent by patients at the Centre reduced from 3-4 hours per patient to less than an hour. And at Royal Preston an ophthalmic surgical hub was created by using two Vanguard two laminar flow theatres. When it opened, one theatre was used for general anaesthesia ophthalmology procedures while the other saw teams carry out local anaesthetic ophthalmic procedures such as cataracts.
For hospitals and Trusts seeking to cut waiting times in a sustainable and speedy way – and in line with Plan for Change – Surgical Hubs created using quickly deployed modular facilities, mobile healthcare spaces or a combination of both, are a truly innovative solution.
Download our white paper, "Reducing waiting lists, generating funds, improving lives: establishing a surgical hub" for more information.