The Cheshire and Merseyside Acute and Specialist Trusts Provider Collaborative (CMAST) established a diagnostics programme focused on driving collaboration, transformation, and continuous improvement for diagnostics across Cheshire and Merseyside.
The programme provides the opportunity to manage diagnostic capacity at system level and identify where gains can be made by working across all providers. To support these aims, the programme is hosted by CMAST, and reports to the Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care Board (ICB), as well as reporting into the NHS England national and regional diagnostics board.
Action taken
The senior responsible owner reset diagnostics delivery within Cheshire and Merseyside, establishing a coordinated programme while simultaneously acknowledging there was already some very good work going on.
CMAST set out the scope of the system-wide diagnostics programme and followed this up with extensive stakeholder engagement including chairs and chief executives across the system.
The diagnostics programme team have weekly patient tracking list (PTL) meetings with individual trusts on productivity measures. They also support each other in the spirit of 'collaborative innovation' by doing things once and then sharing and implementing good practice across the providers. They focus on productivity and asset optimisation by maximising the number of tests they can do with the staff and machines they have.
Clinical leadership is key to their success, and they have clinical leads for endoscopy, imaging, and pathology, who gather the combined view of their peers across the clinical networks.
Outcomes and impact
As a result of working collaboratively, the CMAST diagnostics programme has seen a 100% reduction in patients waiting 79 weeks or more, and a 74% reduction in patients waiting 26 weeks or more. The diagnostics programme has also seen a 12% increase in MRI activity, 17% increase in gastroscopy activity and a 21% increase in activity across all key diagnostic tests (87,000 per month in 2021, 105,000 per month in 2023).
There is also increased capacity and patient choice through 10 new community diagnostic centres meaning people can have multiple tests done at one appointment which is helping to get a diagnosis faster.
Cheshire and Merseyside Acute and Specialist Trusts Collaborative is a large provider collaborative of 13 trusts (full details here). You can read more about both their diagnostics and elective recovery programmes in our case study here.