Thousands of Patients Cleared and Productivity Boosted

Medacs have really helped us to boost our surgical activity and reduce our backlogs. With our substantive teams involved the extra sessions have been well aligned with our routine services and our consultants have had a valuable level of local control

Deputy Director of Operations

The Challenge

In 2022, Medacs began working with an NHS Trust in the East of England that provides a wide range of specialist elective care services to well over a million people. With an elective care backlog of more than 75,000 patients, including 1200 waiting longer than two years, the Trust was under significant pressure and urgently needed to ramp up surgical activity. 

The Approach

Using their pioneering ‘allied’ staffing model, Medacs mobilised a new insourcing service for the Trust in just 3 weeks, building a dedicated resource pool of over 260 theatre professionals. Large numbers of Trust staff signed up to work ‘out-of-hours’ theatre sessions alongside Medacs’ clinical support teams.   

The Solution

Led by experienced local NHS staff, these ‘allied’ teams delivered a rapid increase in surgical activity, with several concurrent theatre sessions running 7 days a week. With the guidance and trusted capabilities of substantive NHS consultants and surgical teams, Medacs also safely built more complexity into the scope of services, helping the Trust to clear more difficult cases with clinical complexities (ASA3+). The initial contract agreed for General Surgery, Orthopaedics, Gynaecology and Urology was quickly extended and three further specialties added (ENT, Oral, and Vascular surgery).  

Results

Medacs coordinated hundreds of extra sessions for the Trust, clearing more than 9500 patients in total, including over 1500 complex cases. 
Productivity and theatre utilisation was successfully improved across all specialties, with 15% more patients treated per session on average. 
During the first year, the Trust successfully reduced its 52-week position by 29% and Medacs’ teams continued supporting increased surgical activity, providing the additional capacity needed for the Trust’s new Orthopaedic centre. 

Medacs’ operating model allows for more elective activity during the week, improving our theatre utilisation. The additional capacity they draft in also helps to ensure that job-planned sessions are not cancelled or curtailed due to staffing shortages

-Senior Orthopaedic Consultant