By Royal Appointment

Yesterday I accompanied Rebecca to an appointment at the Royal Free Hospital in Belsize Park, north London. Rebecca has a thyroid condition called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis which requires regular monitoring. After her consultation Rebecca had to arrange an ultrasound scan of her thyroid and a subsequent appointment at which to receive the results. Scheduling these two appointments required us to visit two separate departments and engage with two different administrators. This felt time-consuming and unnecessarily bureaucratic.

It seems inappropriate that patients - people who are often vulnerable and infirm - must trail around large hospitals in order to organise the next stage of their treatment. Perhaps one way to enhance the patient experience would be to establish a ‘one-stop shop’ approach to the scheduling of appointments.

Such a system would enable patients to arrange multiple appointments with different departments at a single point of contact without the need to visit each department separately. It would also be more efficient, because a system that empowers administrators to schedule several appointments with different departments is likely to require fewer staff than one which requires separate administrators to manage appointments for each individual department.

Good examples of this approach currently exist in local government. The London borough for which I work has a customer care unit that provides a single point of contact through which residents readily access a broad range of council services, from allotments to zebra crossings. This service is efficient, effective, user-friendly and popular with the public.

Establishing a single appointments service for an entire hospital sounds complicated and expensive, especially for a sizeable complex like the Royal Free. However, ultimately this would create a more effective service that delivers immediate improvements to the patient experience in addition to longer-term efficiency gains.

The recent Gershon Review requires public sector bodies to identify significant efficiency savings in order to redirect existing resources from administrative processes to frontline services. Certainly the NHS would benefit from fewer bureaucrats, more doctors and nurses, better facilities, and a more patient-friendly administration.

Reducing bureaucracy in the appointments system would be a first step towards freeing-up precious funding for frontline healthcare. Moreover, it would nurture a win-win scenario in which NHS patients enjoy smoother access to improved services.

Dave