A referral letter usually opens with a history. The practice tried opening with the question instead, and the replies started arriving faster.
Prevention work is invisible when it succeeds, which makes it the first thing cut and the last thing measured.
Ten minutes is not enough and everyone in the building knows it. The question the practice asked was what ten minutes is actually best spent on.
Specialists were spending a letter working out what we wanted. So we put it in the first line.
Illustrative composite
The change was administrative rather than clinical. Certain patients were flagged to a named clinician, and the booking system stopped offering them anyone else.
Median time to first contact fell by nineteen days across the year, on no extra staff.
