Medequip is committed to constant improvement, enhancing our services for the people who rely on us to help them stay independent for longer. This was the key focus behind the London Next Day Project, which was initiated towards the end of 2020 working in close cooperation with our partners in the Royal Borough of Greenwich and Waltham Forest.
The key objective was to contribute towards improved wellbeing for people who use our services by stepping up our response times to ensure they received their equipment more quickly. Collections were also included to support our return, recycle, reuse performance enabling faster re-issue to new service users. The associated challenge was to achieve this without incurring extra cost for the Boroughs who fund our service.
Initially, prescribers in the two Boroughs were encouraged to place orders for both deliveries and collections as ‘next day’ priority, aiming to reduce any reliance on Emergency orders. The Medequip teams undertook to step up the service from five days per week to a six day week, including Saturdays, for Borough residents.
How was this achieved?
We needed to achieve a number of things in order to maintain these levels of service. We reshaped our technician and management resources to cover the six day week, and calculated new tariffs to average out any additional costs. Stock levels were rigorously monitored and maintained to guarantee availability of goods. Daily reports were produced to track speed usage and spend accurately, whilst weekly monitoring assessed and reviewed both numbers of activities and cost to the Boroughs.
In turn, the Boroughs initiated regular internal communications and webinars to influence a change in prescriber culture and behaviours to optimise the revised service levels. Ongoing monitoring was carried out to ensure prescribers were raising orders on correct delivery speeds, and ‘prescriber guides’ were produced to be shared with other members of the London Consortium (the largest and longest outsourced Community Equipment service in the UK, managed by Medequip) to assist with the implementation of our Next Day Project in the future.
Both Boroughs have been very satisfied with the outcome of the project, with Next Day orders increased from an average of 15% to 50% without any corresponding increases in activity costs. Feedback from teams such as Rapid Response and Hospital Discharge has been extremely positive, and Medequip has experienced no detrimental effects on KPIs or equipment stock levels. Both contracts remain on the next day model,
Into the future – the Next Day Project Phase 2
On November 1st this year, both Wandsworth and Lambeth also adopted the Next Day Project approach. After just a month, both contracts have progressed to achieving 40% of all orders at this level. There has been very positive feedback from the prescriber teams for faster deliveries which are assisting with hospital discharges, and Commissioners at both Boroughs are happy with the significant progress made.