Healthcare Operations department - information request
Dear Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust,
Please could you provide the following information:
How many staff do you currently employ to undertake RTT validation tasks?
How many more permanent or temporary staff are expected to be needed over the next 12 months?
How many open RTT pathways do you have currently?
How many staff do you currently employ to undertake clinical coding validation tasks?
How many more permanent or temporary staff are expected to be needed over the next 12 months?
Do you operate and utilise a live bed state system?
Has your organisation implemented any centralised or 24 hour bed management process, or have an automatic electronic utilisation data capture solution.
If so, which processes or solutions are in use?
What is the name, job title, and department contact email address of the primary decision maker for change control of the bed state process?
How many Urgent Care/Emergency Department staff have access to the spine lookup and validation service to verify demographics at the point of patient registration?
Yours faithfully,
Clive Townsend
Dear Sir
Thank you for your request for information. We will respond as soon as possible.
Kind regards
Sandra Henderson
Executive Administrator
Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Good afternoon
Thank you for your FOI.
Can you please confirm if this email was meant for us as you mention Urgent Care/Emergency Department staff. We are a provider of mental health services and community health services and are not commissioned to provide these services. Therefore we cannot answer this FOI in relation to those departments nor surgical or medical beds.
Kind regards
Tina Kellow (BA)
Freedom of Information Officer/Executive Assistant
Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Please note I do not work on Wednesday
Dear FOI BHT - Berkshire Healthcare NHS Trust,
Thank you for reviewing my questions and reaching out with additional information about your status.
I am aware of your specialised status however in my investigations to date, many organisations share teams and I didn't want to discount any partnership or team sharing that may be in operation with your services delivery, and local or wider acute services you may interact with.
In regards to the apparent specific nature of the questions, I had hoped these were generic enough to be able to cross service borders but perhaps that requires an example or two.
Not having been a user of the services you provide it was hard to find an alternative language than provided. I am not aware of how you may process referrals or record and track the elapsed time between referral and service delivery. I am aware there is an ability to self-refer to mental health services generally but am not aware of how this may change the amount of effort needed to support the process.
Referral To Treatment seemed to be a common place wording for such a process and I’d hoped this applied to both acute and non-acute services.
Whilst some questions, i.e. a live bed state, may immediately direct people to acute settings, services local to me have bed allocations across numerous residences which include hospitals and secure residential settings.
How the availability of such locations are tracked, and seeking to clarify if there's a live service available, is simply my attempt at making the question non-location specific.
It could be that you have on-call care coordinators who make calls as and when required, or a fully electronic monitoring system.
I hope that these examples may allow you to align the wording of the questions asked to your service as a whole, but I am also aware from other responses that "not applicable" may feature heavily in your response.
I would be keen to receive information that is already known/easily accessible to your organisation rather than focus too deeply on one aspect, and if I were to need to submit a more specific FOI request, I would do so from a position of knowledge of your responses at that stage.
Yours faithfully,
Clive Townsend
Thank you for your response.
We have one further question for you in relation to How many staff do you
currently employ to undertake RTT validation tasks
Can you please advise what you mean by validation tasks? Is this clinical
teams or something else i.e. Data Quality?
Thank you
Tina Kellow (BA)
Freedom of Information Officer/Executive Assistant
Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
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Please note I do not work on Wednesday
Dear FOI BHT - Berkshire Healthcare NHS Trust,
RTT (referral to treatment) validations must be carried out to ensure accuracy of reporting. For example, it is important that patients are on the correct RTT, and it is closed properly and on time. Not doing so would result in incorrectly reported breaches (for example). I would expect there to be resources employed by your organisation to carry out validation exercises to ensure RTTs are properly recorded.
I hope this answers your question.
Yours sincerely,
Clive Townsend
Thanks for this. I will pass it on to the service dealing with this request.
Tina
Dear Mr Townsend
Please find attached our response to your FOI request.
Kind Regards
Tina Kellow
Freedom of Information Officer/Executive Assistant
Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
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