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Epsom & St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust – technology at the heart of service delivery and compliance
Challenge
Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust provide an extensive range of hospital services to over 490,000 people in South West London and North East Surrey. They operate two teaching hospitals, Epsom Hospital and St Helier Hospital, as well as running services from other locations, including Sutton Hospital.
With 880,000 people visiting the hospitals for care and treatment every year, the hospitals need 4,900 staff and 500 volunteers to keep them running.
The Trust required a partner who can deliver patient-centred high-quality services that deliver value for money, process compliance and MI transparency.
Solution
To support our client, we have built an empathetic team that achieves consistent service excellence, with technological innovation at the heart of service delivery.
Domestic Services
We foster a patient-first culture that ensures our staff recognise the individual needs of all patient groups and respects their rights to comfort, dignity and the highest possible standards of care.
We provide scheduled, reactive and planned cleaning services. Focussed on collaborative working, our procedures are clinically-led and designed to minimise hospital infections.
Consistency is core to the way we provide the service: our cleaning teams are designated to specific wards and departments, ensuring the are fully familiar with day-to-day routines.
At Epsom Hospital, in addition to our scheduled cleaning routine, in order keep busy areas such as receptions and public toilets clean at all times, we have deployed smart cleaning monitors that enable real-time demand-led cleaning.
Portering Services
The portering department impacts every part of the hospital, providing a vital service to patients, staff and visitors. Without a cohesive team, the hospital would come to a standstill.
We provide a seamless service to the Trust, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year.
Our range of duties include:
- Patient moves
- Cleaning and servicing wheelchairs
- Waste collection
- Ad-hoc linen deliveries
- Mortuary duties
- Transportation of health records
- Medical gases
- General furniture and equipment movement
- Pathology, x-ray and pharmacy duties
- Post room service
To maximise service efficientcy and aid resource management, we use geolocation technology to track our porters around the site in real-time – this enables jobs to be allocated to the most conveniently located porter with minimum delay.
In addition, the transparency the system provides means that double bookings are eliminated and instances of clinical teams needing to carry out non-clinical tasks are reduced.
Helpdesk Services
The helpdesk is the hub of all planning, management, auditing and reporting activities for our services. Our helpdesk operators manage and coordinate all tasks, including reactive, planned and additional works.
They also undertake regular checks on resource levels, utilisation and colleague whereabouts – this is fundamental in ensuring Trust response times, SLAs and KPIs are achieved.
Patient Catering
As food is vital to healing, our patient menus reflect the nutritional requirements needed for recovery and rehabilitation. Our Head of Dietetics works in partnership with Trust dietitians to ensure our menus address the clinical and cultural needs of each patient group.
We use a tablet-based state-of-the-art patient catering management system which enables meal orders to be taken at the patient’s bedside.
Retail Catering
Our catering facilities offer staff and visitors a pleasant and relaxed atmosphere, and a diverse range of heathy food to suit their tastes.
Our flagship restaurant brand ‘The Dining Room’ provides fresh, locally sourced food in a great environment – the restaurants would not look out of place on the high street. In addition to providing nourishing food, they provide an environment that supports emotional, mental and physical wellbeing.
Our sustainable menus change regularly and embrace contemporary food trends.
Our technology-led approach to all our services enables us to share accurate compliance and performance information with the Trust – alongside our patient-first approach, this transparency is a key to our successful relationship.
Our systems combine to produce customised dashboards to provide real-time performance data and a MI reporting – this data is also available to Trust colleagues at any time via tablets, smart phones or PCs.
Outcome
Our work with the Trust goes from strength to strength. Our exceptional service has also received external recognition including Epsom Hospital being named as a finalist at the 2018 Kimberly Clark Golden Service Awards – a leading awards programme for the Facilities Management and contract cleaning sectors in the UK and Ireland.
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