Improving Value: Cost and Waste Reduction through Quality Improvement Initiatives

By Katherine Brittin, Associate Director of Quality Improvement 

Improving value for the community we serve is one of the Trust’s strategic objectives. There are many efforts around the Trust that use QI methods to reduce waste in the system. To help teams to work through how they can reduce and avoid unnecessary costs through improvement work, the QI team in collaboration with the financial viability team, aims to ensure teams have the support they need to improve value using QI methods. This is so that teams can connect with them to receive support around understanding the related cost applied to potential value measures. This will help teams to identify cost and waste reduction or avoidance.  

Bedfordshire and Luton crisis team used QI to help them successfully reduce medication waste and in turn money wasted. They measured the number of tablets destroyed each week and the related cost as their outcome measure. By testing change ideas, such as medication expiry identification, specific staff training and texting service users to collect medication, the team are saving £500 a year. The next step is to scale these ideas to other areas so that there is a cumulative combined cost reduction across the Trust. Learn more about this work here.    

City and Hackney Adult mental health services are using the ELFT QI approach to reduce unnecessary secure ambulance spend and to increase internal ambulance use. The team are measuring their monthly spend as an outcome measure and how many internal ambulance trips are made per month as their process measure. The QI team is working with the project lead and business finance partner to help the team estimate how much savings could be made each week. The team are beginning to see signs of a reduction in their ambulance spend (chart below). Going forward the team will be supported to look at their data weekly and to match against the number of uses of internal ambulances.