What is Clinical Insourcing?
Services and benefits explained
Clinical Insourcing providers manage the delivery of extra medical services (e.g. surgical and diagnostic procedures) using spare NHS facilities. The purpose is to boost service outputs in line with national waiting list targets.
Extra services are often delivered outside normal working hours (e.g. at weekends) but some insourcing providers, including Medacs, support in-week services as well.
Clinical Insourcing allows the NHS to cost-effectively retain elective care and recovery services in-house, and offer patients a true 7-day service, instead of transferring them to independent or private sector providers for treatment.
Traditional insourcing providers tend to bring in their own external teams. This can work for diagnostic and low-risk outpatients services, but is not appropriate for more specialist surgical procedures.
To date, good progress has been made clearing routine elective care backlogs, but long waits persist with more complex cases (ASA3+) that cannot be easily outsourced.
Medacs insourcing service is designed to safely tackle complex surgical work that others can’t. This is achieved by building trusted 'allied' teams, with integrated support for related services such as recovery departments or inpatient beds.
"An excellent and consistent service, I have had very positive feedback from everyone involved"
Consultant Clinical Lead
Fast Results
New insourcing projects can be implemented very quickly, providing an instant uplift in the volumes of patient procedures completed each week.
Insourcing services can be procured swiftly via a range of national frameworks, with Government funding allocated via the Elective Recovery Fund (ERF).
New projects are typically mobilised in under 3 weeks, depending on the nature of the contract and services required.
Sub-tariff pricing
Added value is delivered with below-tariff rates, charged per procedure completed, with no charges levied when procedures are cancelled.
The NHS also benefits from built-in support with wider aspects of service delivery such as list and workforce planning, clinical coding and governance.
Services can also be flexibly stood up or down to suit changing circumstances.
Workforce
The NHS can depend on insourcing providers with strong staffing backgrounds like Medacs to draft in extra clinical staff, even at the very last minute.
Insourcing providers also have the ability to offer bespoke bonus schemes to incentivise a wider pool of workers.
Medacs has an unrivalled bank of specialist surgical workers and can quickly backfill with reserve staff when unexpected absences occur.
Patient Experience
Satisfaction levels among patients treated by insourcing teams are extremely positive.
Research shows that in a familiar setting, such as their local hospital, patients are less anxious, less likely to cancel their appointment and more likely to accept the care and treatment advice given.
Many patients also prefer the convenience of weekend or evening appointments.
Shared Learning
Insourcing providers have a continual focus on identifying working efficiencies to maximise value for the NHS.
When substantive staff are involved in insourcing projects, more efficient working practices quickly become embedded as standard.
This has a knock-on benefit for wider service delivery, supporting NHS teams to improve productivity and workforce planning.
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