ELAB Webinars - Call for Action on Waiting Lists

This online session led by Tom Smith, Head of Activity Analysis & Forecasting at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, gives an overview of some of the “facts” about waiting lists that are useful for NHS analysts to understand.

We’ll show how the R package implements these facts, and how various functions within the package can be used to turn raw waiting list data and histograms into actionable information. There is a surprising amount of “signal” hidden in your waiting list data – this session will help you draw it out and bring your waiting list data to life!

Join Jaideep Pandit, Professor of Anaesthesia at the University of Oxford, for a session on understanding “efficiency” in the context of open theatres. He will discuss how most meaningfully to measure efficiency in the context of operating theatres, specifically rejecting surrogate metrics like starting on time or utilisation.  The session will then focus on how best to achieve efficiency, which is to schedule accurately. In the final part it will consider what is meant by capacity in the context of operating theatres, and how to plan for it for both elective and emergency theatres. The lecture will challenge many embedded notions and offer working examples to help the audience understand the principles.

About Jaideep J Pandit

Jaideep, also an NHS Consultant at Oxford University Hospitals and a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, trained in medicine at Oxford with a double first in physiology and medicine. He has served as Clinical Director of Operating Theatres and as Clinical Advisor to NHS England for Theatres. In addition to medical qualifications he holds a doctorate in operations (systems) management from the Said Business School and an MBA with Distinction.
His prize-winning book, “Practical Operating Theatre Management” is published by Cambridge University Press, and a second edition is due in 2027. He is the first non-American to serve as Editor-in-Chief of Anesthesia & Analgesia, the world’s oldest anaesthesia journal, in over 100 years.
Among his visiting professorships is one at Harvard, in association with the Beth Israel Hospital, where he co-directs a masters programme in quality and safety in healthcare.

This session, led by Amy Makawana, Data Scientist, Analysis & Forecasting Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, examines how her team has applied the NHSR Waitinglist package. It will walk through practical waiting list scenario modelling that quantifies the capacity increases required to meet RTT targets – and shows what is likely to happen if no action is taken. The sessions will provide dummy data and the code to enable you to follow along and take this away to modify for your own data and challenges.

About Amy Makawana

Amy worked in various laboratory NHS roles before shifting to data analysis and completing the NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme in 2024. She has worked primarily on ICB level population health demand forecasting, and currently RTT performance and PTL analysis at NUH. Alongside this, she completed an analytics placement with PwC, and an MSc in Health Informatics at UCL and the University of Manchester. Her experience has shown her the operational impact of growing waiting lists on service delivery, shaping her interest in using analytics to support waiting list management.