Summary

Ipsen and Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham worked together to create a new dedicated dietitian service to help manage patients' symptoms and nutritional status, resulting in increased patient satisfaction and reduced waiting times.

Project outline and outcome

Previous dietetic resource at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham (QEHB) was limited resulting in inequitable access for patients who needed specialist dietary management to help with their symptoms, somatostatin analogue (SSA)-related side effects as well as optimising their fitness to allow for other treatments and surgery.

A dedicated NET specialist dietetic service was required to maximise access and deliver an improved standard of care.

The trust (UHB) required a pilot to provide a proof of concept before committing to longer term funding. The NET department lead recognised Ipsen’s heritage in NETs and approached us to discuss a patient centric 2-year Joint Working Initiative ending in 2022 to develop, implement and measure a specialist dietetic service for all NET patients who needed it.

The objectives were to:

Deliver a high-quality patient experience by ensuring that the management and review process for NET patients was clear, concise and provided equity of care to all patients.
Capture service data that will demonstrate the value of a new model of care to patients and NHS e.g. patient satisfaction, reduced waiting times/reduced number of hospital appointments, prudent resource allocation.
Share the patient benefits of this Joint Working Initiative to allow others to access and potentially replicate this service.

Despite COVID-19 significantly impacting access to care in 2020/21, the following outcomes have been delivered:

Benefits for Patients:

Significant increase in dietitian appointment availability along with a cut in waiting times.
Patients seen by a dietitian had a full nutritional assessment including weight, BMI and handgrip strength.
Service data captured demonstrated improvements in patient satisfaction with continuation of the service following project completion.