Providing solutions to improve outpatient flow and turnaround time of outpatient pathology tests at the Campbelltown hospital pathology department

This research concerns the pathology department of the Campbelltown hospital. Campbelltown and Camden public hospital are the two hospitals that provide networked services for the MacArthur community in South Western Sydney. The provided services include intensive care, cardiology, maternity, gynaecology, oncology, paediatrics, palliative care, respiratory and stroke medicine, surgery and emergency medicine and aged care services (SSWAHS, 2010). A pathology department provides pathology services to a hospital and its patients. The main activities are the collection of human specimens like urine and blood and testing them for deviations for diagnostic purposes. Specimens can come in through internal hospital transportation from inpatients and the emergency department, or through the pathology collection station from outpatients. This research focuses on the outpatient collection process. The Campbelltown hospital has recognized the problem of access block: the situation where patients in the emergency department (ED) requiring inpatient care are unable to gain access to appropriate hospital beds within a reasonable time frame, resulting in ED overcrowding (Fatovich, Nagree, & Sprivuli, 2005). High volume ED presentations can create delays incurred by access block and these delays are exacerbated if ED clinicians do not have access to timely diagnostic information. Collecting the specimens from outpatients takes up a lot of time in the pathology department that could otherwise be used to process specimens from the ED and inpatient wards. The problem the pathology department faces is an inefficient outpatient flow and a long turnaround time of outpatient tests due to a mismatch between capacity and demand on the outpatient collection process. This research aims to provide solutions to improve the outpatient flow and reduce the turnaround time of outpatient pathology tests by focussing on the mismatch between outpatient demand and capacity