Pam Black, a former SCoR President and now Divisional Services Development Manager at Aintree, gave the first keynote presentation of the day, detailing the progress of a collaboration between different regions within the trust, to produce a future service model that is very much in the early stages of development.
The aim is to collaborate in order to improve patient pathways, optimise resources, make the most of any spare capacity and improve turnaround times, to enhance service delivery in a geographically diverse regional area.
Pam described how the newly set up radiology working group and planned sub groups, would be tackling issues such as workforce and education; models of care; IT issues; facilities and estates; and financing, contracts and HR.
Key aims
• Flexible workforce
• Home reporting
• Collaborative reporting
• Reporting hubs
• Expansion of advanced practice
• Joint procurement of equipment/technology
• IT system standardisation
• Seven-day service
• Increased repertoire of clinical pathways
• Optimise the skill mix
• Optimise equipment capacity
• Standardise working practices
“We are already sharing to a certain extent but it’s not giving us the flexibility we need for patient turnaround, so we need to look further. We have to identify enablers and barriers, test some ideas, and basically find out what will work and what won’t,” said Pam.
“We know it may aspirational and not reality but we won’t know for sure until we try it. Like all great ideas it will take time to work through, but to me the definition of success is going from failure to failure without giving up.”