Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust partnership drives cardiac care excellence

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is one of the largest and busiest acute hospital Trusts in the United Kingdom. Its cardiac clinical services unit admits over 25,000 patients a year and it provides specialist cardiology services to a regional population of over 5.4 million across West Yorkshire. The Trust operates an aspirational Centre of Excellence innovation program. This not only benefits the local population, but also the global cardiology community through developing cutting-edge cardiology techniques.

In 2019, the Trust was facing these challenges:

“We were experiencing downtime and didn’t want to have to postpone or limit the number of patients,” says Dr. Chris Pepper, clinical director at the Trust. “We realized that we needed to be able to offer the very latest capabilities and innovative medical equipment in a suitable environment.” He goes on to say, “Leeds is one of the largest providers of specialized services in the United Kingdom, so it’s of the utmost importance that we ensure our services incorporate the latest medical technology innovations to ensure we stay ahead and deliver the very best for our patients.”

To meet its aspirations to maintain Yorkshire Heart Centre as a Cardiology leader, the Trust established a 10-year Managed Service strategic partnership with Philips with the joint aim to reduce patient wait times and costly outsourcing for ultrasound services across two sites.

“The ability to bring in world-class equipment is something we want for all of our patients, so the opportunity to partner with Philips and to explore ways to enhance our cardiology service, is of significant benefit,” says Julian Hartley, chief executive officer at the Trust.

Through co-creation, Philips and the Trust identified the need to replace existing medical technologies and redesign the department in combination with designing service improvement and education programs. Using Philips hospital integration 3D modelling solution, the Trust and Philips visualized ways to improve patient pathways and workflows, which led to a full cardiology service redevelopment program. Additional support with business case development and financial modelling is included in the partnership.

Central to the partnership is the dedicated on-site customer delivery manager, who works hand in glove with Trust management and the clinical teams. The customer delivery manager gets Philips Helpdesk support to ensure immediate access to fault reporting, resolution and scheduling preventative maintenance. The customer delivery manager also ensures that key deliverables such as implementing new equipment, service improvement programs and training are completed on time and on budget per the partnership’s roadmap.

“We have received great support from Philips,” says Gina McGawley, general manager of Cardiology at the Trust. “They have become part of our extended team and have supported us from a clinical, operational and patient and staff experience perspective.”

And according to Pepper, “There has been a palpable sense of excitement. The cardiology team at Leeds is very proud of the quality of cardiac care we are able to deliver for our patients. We see this partnership as a hugely exciting and positive opportunity to improve this further, with the overall objective to provide state-of-the-art cardiac imaging as part of a highly efficient and forward-looking cardiology service.”

Ahead of the official partnership commencement, Philips and the Trust agreed on a fast-track program, which included replacing and upgrading the Trust’s existing, outmoded and inefficient ultrasound devices to optimize cardiac ultrasound uptime.

Shortly after the partnership had started, one of the Trust’s catheter labs, which was not originally planned for early renewal, ceased functioning. Philips agreed to install an interim solution, immediately replacing existing equipment with a Philips Zenition mobile C-arm system to maintain availability.

“The partnership has enabled the clinical teams and Philips to quickly identify an interim solution for catheter lab one, which ensured our patients continued to have timely access to our cardiac services,” says Tracy Rennard, cardiology service manager at the Trust. “The solution provided resilience across our services while major building works were carried out to replace our two other catheter labs.”

The partnership includes the refresh of six fully featured interventional cardiac labs incorporating Philips Azurion platforms, two of which are specialized electrophysiology suites, a structural heart suite and advanced patient monitoring.

During the initial co-creation program, Philips and the Trust had identified ways to improve workflow. This included updating the cardiology service layout to move electrophysiology (EP) inside the updated catheter labs, improving staff experience and communication.

Philips and the Trust faced the challenge of refreshing the first two catheter labs during the COVID-19 pandemic. There was also added difficulty as the first two labs being refreshed were interconnected; they had to be completed simultaneously. Maintaining patient throughput was paramount, as the Trust is the primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) center for the surrounding area. It was essential to maintain 24/7 availability of the EP labs to ensure PCI services continued without disruption.

With limited access to site and with social distancing protocols, Philips’s project managers and Trust operational teams leveraged Philips’s 3D technology to visualize each lab, ensuring sufficient space and access for staff and patients. Additionally, Philips and the operational teams worked closely with the Trust’s estates and facilities departments to enable site access to ensure building works could commence, technologies could be installed and deliverables could be met.

During the development program, through leveraging the interim lab solution, the Trust was able to maintain EP service availability and patient throughput above 90%.

A major component within the partnership is the Service Improvement program, which focuses on identifying ways to drive clinical and operational improvement. Led by a Philips Service Improvement Specialist and Sarah Miller, head of Nursing at the Trust, this includes:

“Service and quality improvement for us as an organization is driven by our people, so the partnership has come at a really crucial time,” says Miller. “We have our improvement method and methodology and so it will now be about how the partnership can support further data analysis about how we are working and where our next improvement projects should lay.”

Still in its early years, the partnership is already delivering value. The first two catheter labs have been launched, with staff and patients benefiting from improved workflow, modern environments and integrated medical technologies.

“Having everything in one place and being better integrated means patient flow is improved,” says Muzahir Tayebjee, consultant cardiologist at the Trust. “The new labs and equipment have meant we can be far more efficient, completing multiple examinations in one appointment, reducing the length of exam time, delivering better imaging and more accurate diagnoses, leading to better patient outcomes. It is also now far more comfortable an environment to work in.”

The partnership is now focusing on refreshing the next two cath labs:

The new labs aim to enable more complex cases, improve examination accuracy and increase efficiency and patient throughput, ensuring the Trust can deliver on their Centre of Excellence status aspirations.

New labs will be refreshed with:

Managed Services is the comprehensive, vendor-neutral Philips solution designed to guide and support you in achieving optimized business outcomes. Working in close partnership as an extension of your team, we go beyond traditional Managed Equipment Services by treating technology as an enabler for transformation. Our flexible agreements are grounded in actionable data insights to support you in making confident investment decisions.