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The benefits of this project
Benefits for Your Patients
- Time saved when collecting specimen containers
Benefits for Your Practice
- Reduced clutter and confusion
- Clinician time saved as reception team will print forms and provide specimen containers when needed
- Financial savings from reduced printing paper & specimen container waste
Benefits for The Planet
- Reduced waste from uncollected specimen containers
Opportunity for improvement
- In some GP practices, clinicians leave printed pre-labelled specimen containers for patients to collect from the reception desk in plastic pathology specimen bags. These are frequently not collected, leading to waste. In addition, the numerous forms, bags and containers can cause clutter, leading to confusion and difficulty in finding the correct items for patients who do come to collect sample pots.
- Improving specimen container collection can streamline the process, reducing waste and lowering risk of errors. This quality improvement project suggests a method for making this change (see disclaimers).
How to carry out this project
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Investigate
Look at your GP reception area. Is there a space where specimen containers are stored awaiting patient collection? Is it well organised? Are many of the items out of date?
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Baseline data collection
Do a quick audit e.g. number & type of specimen containers, to get a baseline measurement.
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Discuss
Chat to clinicians, the reception team, IT team and practice lead team. What do they think of the current system? Do they have any suggestions for improvement? Is it possible for the reception team to print specimen forms and provide containers to patients?
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Specimen container guide
Adapt this Specimen Container Guide to work for your practice. You could use a table or list format.
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Reception training
Work with the reception team leaders and IT team to ensure all reception team members have access to and are trained in how to print specimen container forms and which containers are needed for the different samples.
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Specimen containers
Ensure there is a supply of specimen containers in the reception area, a system in place for re-stocking them and an easily visible copy of the Specimen Container Guide.
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Clinician training
Ensure all clinicians requesting samples are aware of how to save them to print later. Consider how the practice will know if patients have not done important tests e.g. FIT tests. Clinicians may want to send themselves a scheduled task to check if patients have done certain vital tests.
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Advertise the change
Publicise the guide and new system to all staff (email, F2F, practice meetings, staff newsletters) and ask them to feedback if any issues.
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Check in
Touch base with all staff including the Reception team every 1-2 weeks to ensure the process is working smoothly for patients and staff.
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Post-intervention data
3-4 weeks after advertising the new system, re-audit the number of specimen containers in reception to look for change.
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Review the results
Review the results, summarise learning, share with practice team + decide if any changes are needed to improve the process. Decide when to re-audit again to ensure the change has lasted e.g. 2-3 months and use the Project Monitoring form to keep track. Include the new system in any staff handbooks and induction so all staff aware of the process.
Top tip
The reception team is key to this project, so ideally, lead on it together or chat with them early on to get their views on how best to make it work.
How to scale this project up or down
| Please note - Use of this project requires NetworkPLUS membership. If you would like to share this project with others, please invite them to purchase their own membership—access must not be shared with non-members. |
Share your project with your PCN, Federation, ICB (England) or Cluster, Health Board (Scotland or Wales) or GP federation, Health Trust (Northern Ireland), so the learning can be shared and the project easily implemented by other practices too.
Case study
Over the years, staff noted that specimen pots and request forms had been building up in the filing cabinets in reception, and patients were not collecting them when asked. Not infrequently, clinicians would put a pack in reception for patients, but the receptionists could not find them when the patient came to collect them. This was wasting valuable clinician, reception, and patient time and resources (pots, paper, ink, plastic bags, etc.), often discarded unused. It would also stop sending sample pots off unfilled by reception as they sometimes occurred before patients collected them.
It was helpful to have a point of contact once the system was up and running so one person could deal with any questions quickly.
Some doctors were concerned that patients would not correctly add their names to FIT tests. Sending an AccuRx that everyone could access was found to help resolve this issue.Mile Oak Medical Centre, Brighton
The reception was overjoyed with the extra space in their filing cabinets, and the waste was reduced substantially.
Have you completed this QIP?
Tell us a little about your project and enter your data in order to generate a certificate showing the probable cost savings and other benefits. This project may help with CQC evidence submission (see disclaimers).
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