Supporting elective recovery by increasing theatre throughput

To address growing waiting lists the Elective Recovery Fund was established in January 2023 to support national delivery of 107% of 2019/20 value-weighted elective activity, with local targets ranging from 103% to 114% by ICB.

Following industrial action in November 2023 this was relaxed to a national aim of 103% but to continue making progress against these ambitions local teams need to assess how they can improve their own productivity amongst constrained resource.

Vital to increasing elective recovery throughput is the optimisation of theatre booking and scheduling processes. Figure 1 shows commonly seen barriers to optimising booking and scheduling processes. To overcome these barriers multidisciplinary teams need to come together to enable and incentivise positive change.

Figure 1 Click to enlarge

Optimising booking and scheduling processes will provide opportunity for increased utilisation and increased cases per list. Figure 2 highlights the bidirectional impact between these two factors and how they can be improved in tandem to increase throughput and ensure services remain sustainable in the long term.

Figure 2 Click to enlarge

Restoring and improving productivity has remained challenging for most Trusts nationally, but through our work we have implemented a number of initiatives that are delivering impact (c. 20% waiting list reductions), and in some cases, enable Trusts to generate additional revenue in year.