Ambulance Transformation
Francis Group and its UK based partner Lightfoot Solutions have launched an ambulance transformation programme for St John that will streamline their internal capabilities in order to provide more effective and efficient care to the people of New Zealand.
St John is one of the most recognised brands in New Zealand, and has New Zealand’s largest mobile clinical workforce (more than 16,000 members), almost 200 ambulance locations and more than 600 vehicles on the road. St John wished to make sure that they were best placed to meet the evolving needs of communities throughout the country.
The key issue facing St John’ is being able to respond adequately to growth in ambulance service demand at a time when charitable contributions continue to be needed even more to meet ambulance and emergency preparedness capability. Examining their performance and service effectiveness more rigorously on an on-going basis is a basic element of the transformation programme.
The transformation programme focuses on helping St John work with other primary care providers to refine their model of care, and will produce such outcomes as better management of patients in a community setting, with fewer patients being unnecessarily transported to hospital.
To achieve the best possible results from the transformation programme, Francis Group have been working collaboratively with UK-based company Lightfoot Solutions – a leading provider of performance improvement solutions within healthcare organisations – who offer the unique and cutting edge performance management platform signalsfromnoise®.
Stuart Francis, Managing Director of Francis Group, believes that “Lightfoot’s signalsfromnoise® (sfn) is the next generation of business intelligence. sfn can be used to measure, monitor and manage performance and highlight the root causes of issues requiring improvement.”
Benefits of sfn are its ability to continuously refresh and monitor performance across multiple systems and business processes, and its use of statistical process control to support root cause analysis, enabling a line manager to identify and target areas of greatest gain, and measure the results of improvement efforts.
St John understand that New Zealanders expect high performance standards of their ambulance service and are working more and more to support and complement GPs, other community-based providers and emergency departments in order to make sure that the best care pathways deliver the best outcomes for patients and their families.
This programme will change the landscape of urgent care in New Zealand to one that is better for patients, and where St John staff work more collaboratively with GPs, nurses, emergency departments, and other care providers providing more convenient community based urgent care.
As a qualified (but out of date) ambulance officer, Stuart knows first-hand the challenges St John staff encounter on the job and feels this transformation programme will benefit them as well.
Stuart added, “As clinicians, St John staff always strive to do the best job they can for their patients. The transformation programme will give them new tools and techniques to continuously improve their service.”
To find out more about the work carried out by Lightfoot Solutions and SFN please visit: http://www.lightfootsolutions.com/signalsfromnoise_sfn.htmll