NHSD - Improving Service Delivery

NHS Direct (NHSD) is at the forefront of 24-hour health care, delivering telephone and e-health information services day and night direct to the public.  Over two million people now access NHSD every month.

As part of an initiative to meet agreed national service performance targets, The Accord Partnership was commissioned to lead, direct and manage a project to increase Advisor Availability On Line (AOL - being the amount of logged on time that Advisors are available to patients - either talking to patients or waiting for a patient call) across seven of the nine NHSD regions. 

The Accord Partnership provided practical support to local management teams in the form of one-to-one and group coaching sessions with team leaders and managers.  Regular briefing and review sessions were held to develop and maintain action plans that would deliver the required improvements. 

The project was successfully completed with mean average improvements in AOL of 18.5% in the Health Advisors groups and 16.7% in Nurse Advisors groups.  This gave NHSD a motivational lift and helped achieve a cultural shift towards performance management as well as significantly contributing to the attainment of the national service performance targets.  In addition, telephone interviews carried out with NHSD staff involved in the programme revealed a 99.5% positive or strongly positive response regarding the effectiveness of the approach used by The Accord Partnership.