James Lind Alliance Outpatient Service Delivery Priority Setting Partnership

The final step of our PSP is complete. Our final workshop was successfully completed in December 2023 in Central London. We gathered patients, carers, clerical staff and healthcare professionals to decide on the top 10 priority questions on how best to delivery care through outpatient services. Stay tuned in the new year to discover the top 10.”

Is it possible also to remove the email address mentioned on that page (outpatientjla@sgul.ac.uk) as I am leaving my current job this month and won’t have access to emails anymore.

Update from the PSP – October 2023

Our Outpatient Service Delivery PSP launched its second survey in October 2023. We ask patients, carers/family members, managerial staff, and healthcare professionals in England to choose and rank the 10 most important questions they want answered in future research about how best to deliver care in outpatient services. After gathering the questions we received from our first survey, we now need your help to choose the 10 questions you find most important to answer first by researchers. After gathering your priority questions, we will move to a final workshop where we will agree on the top 10 priority questions. For more information, check our James Lind Alliance Outpatient Service Delivery webpage and our Twitter account.

Link to the survey.

Our Outpatient Service Delivery PSP closed its first survey at the end of March 2023. 210 people from different regions of England responded to the survey. We had a wide range of responses from patients, carers, healthcare professionals, clerical, and managerial staff. In addition to collecting surveys online, we organised face-to-face visits to outpatient clinics in different trusts.

We visited outpatient departments in the North West, East of England, West Midlands, and London. We are thankful for every trust, association, and colleague who helped us to promote the survey and share our project to increase the number of responses and their diversity. We are currently at the stage of analysing the data and organising the questions we received. We will keep posting updates on our web pages and Twitter account.”

More on the Survey

Our Outpatient Service Delivery PSP has been collecting survey responses since November 2022. We have received answers from different regions of England. We have a wide range of participants from patients, carers, healthcare professionals, clerical, and managerial staff. Our Steering Group monitors the responses on a regular basis and updates the data summary every two weeks. Our Steering Group members are promoting the survey among their colleagues, contacts, and networks.

Our PSP is also organising face-to-face visits to outpatient departments in hospitals and to primary care practices. Our first visit outside of London was to the North West of England. This visit helped us move this project forward and increase our responses. The survey will remain open till the end of March to allow us more time to organise face-to-face visits, promote the survey and increase our response rate.

Introduction

Outpatient appointments account for 85% of hospital activity and are fundamental to the running of the NHS. The way outpatients’ services are delivered in the future is going to change, for several reasons including new technology such as video calls and wearable devices, changing health conditions, such as the increase in type 2 diabetes and asthma. Changes to outpatients’ services need to be informed by good evidence and research. This project is looking for your ideas for the important questions about delivering outpatient services in the future.

The scope for this website and our project is only for research purposes focusing on future upcoming studies.

If you have an outpatient appointment query, please refer to the contact numbers listed on your correspondence from the trust.

About us

Our steering group include patients/carers representatives and healthcare professionals. We meet regularly and agree on all aspects and content of each stage of our project with the input and recommendation of the James Lind Alliance (JLA). Details about the members of our team are detailed in this section below “Members of our steering group”.

Our James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnerships

The goal of the JLA is to bring together patients, carers, and healthcare professionals to identify and prioritize the top ten unanswered questions about a particular topic in health care. These ten priority questions will be the focus of future research projects. The opinions of people who use health care services and those who treat and care for them provide important perspectives about people’s concerns and preferences.

Our Priority Setting Partnership (PSP) will focus on children and adults who live in England and attend outpatients’ appointments. The scope for our PSP is the entire outpatient journey, from the initial GP visit to the follow up and referral appointments. Our PSP aims to identify the most important questions to shape the future of how outpatient services are delivered. Finding answers to these questions through research will help to ensure that outpatient services are delivered in the ways that meets the needs of patients and health and care professionals.

The first phase of our PSP is to ask patients, carers, and health and care professionals and managerial/clerical staff to fill out a survey with questions they want answered in future research. The second phase is to check whether these questions were previously answered by research. Then, another survey will be sent to shortlist the questions. The final stage is a one-day workshop that will gather patients, carers, health and care professionals and managerial/clerical staff to share their experiences and knowledge and agree on the final most important ten questions that will be the focus of future research.

Our objectives

The top ten questions that we will gather at the end of our PSP will be published and promoted for funders and researchers. This research will help shape the way in which outpatient services are delivered in the years ahead.

Members of our steering group

Clinical representatives

Ben Bridgewater – Health Innovation London

Ben Bridgewater is Chief Executive of Health Innovation Manchester. Prior to joining Health Innovation Manchester, Ben worked for global technology company DXC Technology as the Director of the Healthcare and Lifesciences Global Build Advisory Team. Until January 2016, he was a cardiac surgeon at the University Hospital of South Manchester for 18 years. Ben also provided clinical leadership for the UK national cardiac audit programme, as well as leading analyses that provides UK hospital and cardiac surgery mortality rates to the public.

Caroline Knox – Deputy General Manager OPD SGH

Caroline has worked at St Georges University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for 18 years and been involved in the delivery of Outpatient Services for the past 13 years holding the position of Deputy General Manager for Outpatient Services since 2019. She was a project manager on their Electronic Document Management project digitising patient records into an electronic solution to support the achievement of a single clinical note at the point of care. When she is not working for the NHS, she volunteers in the Army Cadet Force and holds a Reserve Forces Commission of Captain and holds the position of Company Training Officer.

James Friend – Digital Strategy London Region NHS England

James is a highly experienced commercial and health services executive director with a passion for using data to identify and track opportunities for transforming ways of working to improve healthcare outcomes, clinical productivity, and patient experience as well as healthcare product research and development.

Max Carter – Programme Director: NHS North West London CCG

Natasha Curran – MD Health Innovation Network South London

Natasha is Medical Director at the Health Innovation Network, south London’s Academic Health Science Network and leads the Implementation and Involvement team of the Applied Research Collaboration South London. Natasha is a Consultant in Pain Medicine at University College London Hospitals and an Expert Adviser to NICE and journals such as BMJ Open.

Naz Jivani – General Practice The Groves Medical Centre & Clinical Lead Kingston Borough

Naz has been a GP for 26 years, and developed an interest in Musculoskeletal Medicine in 1997. He finished his Masters in Sports Medicine in 2003 and has been part of the Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Team since then. He has recently relinquished his role as Primary Care Borough Chair for Kingston, and is currently South West London Clinical Lead for Trauma and Orthopaedics, Musculoskeletal Medicine and Outpatient Transformation.

Sarbinder Sandhu – Urology Consultant Kingston Hospital

Sarbjinder trained at the Royal Free Hospital in London and gained his higher surgical training in the North Thames Region and the Royal Marsden Hospital. He obtained his MD degree on research into Prostate Cancer.

He is currently Chief of Surgery and Planned Care at Kingston Hospital. Previously, he was the Lead Clinician for both Cancer Services and Urology at Kingston Hospital. He runs General Urology Clinics for St. George’s Hospital and Kingston Hospital (at Queen Mary’s Hospital) and Oncology Clinics in the Sir William Rous Unit at Kingston Hospital

Simon Clayton – Corporate OPD SGH

Simon is the Health Records Manager of St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust based in South West London with 7 years of experience in the NHS. His role consists of providing knowledge and expertise to service users on record management good practice as well as having overall responsibility for the St George’s health records service.

He is passionate about improving the patient experience through increasing process efficiency in the NHS by employing good documentation, communication, training, and utilisation of IT tools.

Toby Smith – Patient Groups and AHPs

Professor Toby Smith is Professor in Musculoskeletal Research (University of East Anglia). He also holds a clinical role at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust as a Physiotherapist in Trauma and Orthopaedics.
Toby’s clinical and research interests centre on the management of older people with musculoskeletal disorders.He has a particular interest in the rehabilitation of people following hip fracture and lower limb trauma and orthopaedic surgery. Toby’s methodological expertise are in the conduct and reporting of clinical trials. He leads or is a team member for a number of national, multi-centre trials, investigating both surgical and non-surgical interventions for people with a variety of musculoskeletal disorders. He has published over 300 peer-review papers

*Patient and carer representatives*
Clive Moore Ceaton – Patient Representative	Clive was diagnosed with Prostate Cancer in 2016 and treated by having a Prostatectomy. Shortly after this, he started getting involved in Public and Patient involvement and engagement as a person with lived in experience. He now serves on many panels and is always trying to get across the importance of the public voice and the need for equality, diversity, and inclusion.
Margaret Ogden – Patient Representative</	Margaret is a PPI member from Co Durham. She has been doing PPI for 15 years covering health, public health, and social care. She has been involved in 4 PSP workshops – retention in clinical trials, malnutrition, wounds, and occupational therapy. She is currently doing two projects with Oxford on PSPs. She also does PPI in education – working with year 1 medical students on primary care.
Rashmi Kumar – Patient Representative</	Rashmi is a full-time carer for elderly mother, living at home, suffering from long-term multiple conditions. He is responsible for management of her health and social care needs which helped to better understand health, psychological and social challenges patients and families face and how with little support health and quality of care can be improved. Rashmi is a Trustee of large Patients Participation Group Network and the Chair of PPI Involvement Advisory Group at the National Institute for Health and Care Research Applied Research Collaborations, South London, bringing together NHS Services, local providers of care services, local authorities, universities, and charities.

Saba Raza-Knight – Specialty Trainee in Neurosurgery, Royal Preston Hospital	I am a neurosurgery specialty trainee in the North West of England. I am also a parent of two young children and recently commenced the Royal College of Surgeons’ Emerging Leaders Fellowship.

PSP Lead

Caroline Hing

Professor of Orthopaedics

Caroline trained in Medicine at University College London. She completed her Orthopaedic and Trauma training on the Pott Rotation based at Barts and The London Hospitals with a further period of training at the Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital whilst completing an MD. She is a Professor of orthopaedics at St George’s University London with research interests in osteoarthritis and trauma. She is a clinical director for corporate outpatients, and she leads for research in orthopaedics in the trust.

James Lind Alliance Adviser and Chair of the Steering Group

Suzannah Kinsella

Suzannah is the JLA Adviser for the Outpatient Service Delivery PSP. She chairs the steering group meetings and gives guidance on the JLA method and principles. Suzannah Kinsella joined the JLA team in April 2019. Other PSPs she has worked on include: Stroke; Childhood Neurological Conditions; Psoriatic Arthritis and Community Nursing and Skin Cancer Surgery. She is currently advising PSPs on spinal muscular atrophy, burn injury and diabetic retinopathy. She is a social researcher who specialises in deliberative public engagement and public dialogue research</

PSP Information Specialist

Marie-Claire Rebeiz – Information specialist

Marie-Claire is the researcher in residence at St George’s University of London. She studied medicine and now has interest in a wide diversity of research subjects. Her current research focus is related to outpatient care, population health and healthcare inequality.

The Outpatient Service Delivery PSP

Outpatient Service Delivery PSP Protocol

Outpatient Service Delivery PSP Terms of Reference

Outpatients – St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust