Case Study:
In 2019, Chelsea & Westminster NHS Foundation Trust, on behalf of the North West London and Kingston Collaborative Group, invited service providers to participate in a tender process for the provision of a Bulk Fluids end-to-end Managed Service to evaluate the options to improve service levels, increase medicines optimisation activities and in turn release storage space, reduce handling and deliver further efficiencies.
The collaboration consisted of Chelsea & Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Kingston Hospital NHS Trust, Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, London North West Healthcare NHS Trust and The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Contract Scale and Complexity
This contract commenced 1st October 2020 to service 14 hospitals, 527 hospital departments, an average of 9,328 monthly fluid line requests of 19,231 fluid cartons, over 2000 end-user customers, Pharmacy teams and contract sponsors who represent the collaboration. The scale of the business and the coming together of so many large and specialist NHS trusts may have been a complexity in itself, let alone setting up a new service of this magnitude, implementing and automating through a digital systems platform and achieving so many objectives and clearly defined KPI’s.
However, after 18 months since we went live at our first hospital and after an agreed period of 12 months to roll out the service to each and every hospital location, Eleanor is proud to confirm that the first objectives have been met and overwhelmed to be part of an incredibly positive experience to see so many influential bodies and persons working together to achieve a defined and common business purpose, which in this case has delivered on its promise.
Together, and with the visibility of Eleanor’s NWLK online KPI and Service Performance Dashboard, which openly displays every conceivable fluid transaction, movement, service level and KPI achievement, we have enhanced patient safety, improved service levels, increased medicines optimisation, released storage space, reduced handling and delivered a profound new richness of data. This data and supporting graphical representation have enabled and empowered each Trust and collaboration business leader to see the service activity and performance at ‘collaboration’, ‘hospital’ and ‘department level’, including how this relates back to or varies from the original business case in terms of quality and commercial, and where they can focus their efforts to drive down costs and make decisions based on facts, trends and statistical numbers.
