World Heart Day 2023:
Philips and Leeds Teaching Hospitals partnership gives patients greater access
to specialist cardiac care

In 2020, Philips and Leeds Teaching Hospitals announced the start of their Managed Service partnership, which set out to create a Cardiology service fit for future demands by upgrading outdated Cardiology facilities and redesigning the department. Since then, and despite the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, Philips and Leeds Teaching Hospitals have celebrated opening four of the six brand-new interventional cardiac labs, based on the Philips Azurion platform. This includes Hybrid Cath Lab 1, which opened in 2022, enabling clinical teams to undertake valve replacement and complex pacemaker procedures.

The new modern labs, with their sleek design and integrated medical technologies, have created a more inviting clinical environment for patients and an efficient working environment for staff. With new and up to date equipment, staff are benefiting from a seamless approach for minimally invasive procedures, improving examination accuracy, efficiency and patient throughput. This is helping to ensure the Trust can deliver on its Centre of Excellence status aspirations, as well as supporting clinicians to focus on treating the patient, and its administrators as they strive to improve productivity and efficiency through intelligent resource management.

With that, 2023 has seen Philips and Leeds Teaching Hospitals work together on a Service Improvement project, exploring ways to streamline processes, improve operational performance and enhance the patient and staff experience within the Cardio Respiratory Clinical Services Unit (CSU). Focusing on first case start times, lab/ward interactions and informatics for scheduling and reporting, the team have been able to improve first case start times in the Cath Labs from 60% in 2022 to 85% in June 2023, in part contributing to a 20% increase in patient volumes within six months [1]. Key to this success was the engagement and commitment of staff, providing a solid foundation for sustaining improvement.

Ambitions within the partnership also included the upgrade of all ultrasound equipment across the Trust. 25 ultrasound systems have been replaced to optimise cardiac ultrasound uptime, minimize disruption and help the department avoid costly outsourcing for ultrasound services. These will be replaced again when they reach the end of their seven-year shelf-life, thanks to a three-year extension to Philips and Leeds Teaching Hospital’s strategic partnership, which was also agreed this year. 

Philips’ Managed Services are comprehensive, vendor neutral solutions designed to guide and support partners in achieving optimised business outcomes. The partnership has seen Philips work closely with, and act as an extension to, the Trust’s teams, helping them solve complex clinical, patient and staff experiential, operational and financial challenges. This includes financial modelling support, helping it tackle the issue of limited capital budgets and ambitious cost improvement targets.  Both companies look forward to continued success in the future.

[1] Many other factors, including increased capacity, have contributed to the observed increase in case volumes