December’s You Made A Difference Team Award goes to the upper GI (gastrointestinal) enhanced recovery project team for the work they have carried out to improve their pathway for cancer patients from good to outstanding.
The multidisciplinary team is made up of a core team of 11 staff from various specialties, including surgery, dietetics, physiotherapy, finance, admin and transformation along with many others who helped along the way.
The team mapped out the patient pathway in order to highlight gaps where improvements could be made. The improvements were based on feedback from our patients as well as examples of best practice from around the world.
The team met monthly for 10 months and so far have:
- Improved patient information booklets, bedside cards and made a series of videos for patients.
- Set up a multi-disciplinary pre-habilitation clinic.
- Changed the type of chest drains used.
- Increased the amount of post-op physio.
- Established six dedicated beds on a ward, freshly decorated and with improved signage.
- Purchased special patient chairs, visitor chairs, fans, exercise bikes, patient fridges and iPads.
- Displayed artwork (using photos taken by one of our talented surgeons).
The team’s winning nomination read, ‘I would like to nominate this team for their dedication and enthusiasm to delivering a wonderful patient-centric service, first suggested over five years ago. The team incorporates a number of services and divisions and has produced a fantastic new pathway for our patients based on their own feedback.’
Importantly, the pathway has been shown to reduce length of stay for our patients. The team and project are a fantastic example of improving services around the needs of our patients, as well as multi-disciplinary team working.