Outpatient strategy sets out our vision for the future

Zero carbon, virtual appointments, specialist advice in primary care settings, thousands using online services, remote monitoring and digitising admin tasks: these are just some of the ways we will achieve patient-centred, integrated, excellent care for our patients as set out in our new outpatient strategy.

This document outlines three key ambitions that we want to achieve over the next few years to ensure our patients get the best care, our resources are used efficiently, and our staff can feel like they are making a real difference.

We will achieve patient-centred care by designing services to fit with patients’ needs and lives, giving them more control over their health. All patients can request to activate MyCare UCLH, our patient portal, so they can access key information about their care, as well as communicate with us and book appointments online at times that suit them.

We will develop a pathway redesign programme to improve the way we work for patients, rapidly expand Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU), maintain 40 per cent to 50 per cent of appointments virtually, delivering improvements to video clinic technology, and expand remote monitoring and messaging of patients to support self-management.

We want to ensure that care is integrated and will take a leading role within the North Central London Integrated Care System (NCL ICS) to deliver proactive care for the population across organisational boundaries. We will invest in getting more specialist advice to patients in primary care and other settings, and improve information sharing, building on the Health Information Exchange.

We will give a greater focus to administrative excellence for patients and our clinical teams, moving away from outdated manual systems and disinvestment. We will streamline and digitise administrative processes, introducing automation for routine tasks. This will free up admin staff to specialise more, coordinate care for patients, and take on more tasks from clinicians. We will improve customer service training, reimagine our patient contact centres, enhance telephone systems and move to far greater digitisation, for example introducing online booking.

Luke O’Shea, director of strategy, said: “This strategy A Hospital without Walls is the culmination of months of work with more than 750 patients and staff. We found that while outpatient clinicians provide the very best possible care, we need to do much more to deliver a modern, sustainable and truly person centred service. This strategy set out our goals and an ambitious programme of work to get there.”

You can read the full strategy here.