World Heart Day 2023: Philips and Leeds Teaching Hospitals partnership gives patients greater access to specialist cardiac care
- Sep 26, 2023
- 3 minute read
Farnborough, United Kingdom – Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) – Philips, a global leader in healthcare technology, is showcasing its long-term strategic partnership with Leeds Teaching Hospitals this World Heart Day 2023 (Friday 29th September), including the opening of a new fully featured Biplane Catheter Lab, which will enable clinical teams to handle more structural heart cases and give patients across West Yorkshire 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of their Managed Service partnership, which set out to create a Cardiology service fit for future demands by upgrading outdated Cardiology facilities and redesigning the department.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.
We have built a good foundation and the partnership between Philips and the Leeds Teaching Hospitals continues to develop and grow. Staff really appreciate the new equipment - the environment is much enhanced, which has improved staff morale and retention and I am sure that the Managed Service has impacted positively on this. We have also seen an improvement in the patients’ experience and confidence, having procedures undertaken in newly refurbished catheter labs. The newly installed cath labs, reconfiguration of stock and service improvement has led to further identification of schemes to increase day case activity and reduce the number of patients who need admission into hospital beds. The positive patient and staff feedback has a general impact on the Trust’s reputation within the community and, as a tertiary centre, beyond Leeds. Locally we are very proud of the cardiology service we provide to the community with high quality care and equipment”
Gina McGawley
This World Heart Day, we’re shining a light on the brilliant work the NHS does to support people with the treatment, prevention and control of cardiovascular disease, which impacts over 7 million people in the UK. Leading the way in improving care for people with CVD, Leeds is a fantastic example of a Trust that’s putting patient needs at the core of its services. Our work together is a true partnership, focused on finding solutions that will further improve the outcomes of cardiac care in the region, whilst supporting our NHS colleagues to work at their very best with the right innovations and clinical spaces to deliver excellent care. With four of the six labs up and running already, we are already making great inroads and we look forward to reporting back on more successes in the years to come,"
Mark Leftwich
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.
Sources
- Many other factors, including increased capacity, have contributed to the observed increase in case volumes
