Chapter 5: Using Booking Centres
Improved communication with patients is essential to the success of all booking systems and in many instances it has been found necessary to establish contact centres to provide a single point for booking all types of appointment and for patient queries.
The establishment of patient contact centres is a natural development in the evolution of more sophisticated Access and Booking systems. This fits within the continuum of solutions that need to be adapted for local use, as systems move to meet tighter and tighter waiting list targets, whilst moving to meet growing patient expectations around quality of services provided.
With centralised systems, a dedicated team is responsible for the entire administration process from receipt of referrals to the patient's appointment.
The advantages of centralising these functions include:
- Receiving and logging all referrals;
- Shorter turnaround for prioritisation and informing patients of outcome;
- Ability to systematically gather information from referral letters;
- Small teams of specialised staff experienced in waiting list policy and chronological booking;
- Central management of clinic templates, cancellations and reductions;
- Single point of contact for patients;
- The ability to reduce waits to a similar level for all clinics;
- Economies of Scale that reduce cost;
- Accurate and up to date waiting list information for all consultants and specialties;
- A natural home for waiting list policies and procedures, incorporating standardised DNA and cancellation policies;
- Regular administrative validation of the waiting lists;
- New patients to be seen in clinic are selected in strict chronological order, according to clinical priority, with the patients with the longest wait seen first.
These benefits have been demonstrated in North Glasgow and Conwy and Denbighshire NHS trust (amongst many) where the booking functions have been centralised and teams set up to deal with booking enquires from patients.
The use of contact centres is a vital part of the solution required to meet the ever more sophisticated and demanding needs of our patients, however, they do not always necessarily need to be located in one place. Advances in technology make it possible to create virtual booking centres that comprise of a number of clerical and admin staff working together as one team.