AUCKLAND CITY AND NORTH SHORE HOSPITALS
Auckland City and North Shore Hospitals partner with ORUA to streamline treatment delivery
ORUA has been working with Auckland City Hospital (ACH) and North Shore Hospital (NSH) to improve treatment delivery.
They have built simulation models of treatment pathways to determine the effect of changes to care delivery. In particular, the focus has been both on high level decisions, such as how services interact to provide timely cancer treatment at NSH, and on departmental staffing policy, such as how the introduction of a pod system will effect time to treatment for patients in the Emergency Department at ACH.
This work has included projects to determine efficient staffing levels and the best way for staff to be utilised. This approach has been used in a Cytology laboratory to meet turn-around targets at ACH and for patient transits at NSH to ensure on-time delivery of patients. Innovative delivery mechanisms have also been considered with evaluation of the introduction of robot orderlies at NSH. The simulation models provide virtual environments that enable both the effect of proposed changes to be estimated and experimentation with the structure of changes, e.g., observing how different rosters affect turn-around times for Cytology. ORUA’s model give decision makers more certainty in the outcomes of their decisions.