Case study

Royal Papworth have used MedPoints to amplify their core vision: bringing tomorrow’s treatment to today’s patients.

Their partnership with Medtronic brought them a new physiologist to relieve their staffing difficulties.

Royal Papworth Hospital is the UK’s leading heart & lung hospital, treating over 50,000 patients every year, with the core vision of bringing tomorrow’s treatment to today’s patients.

The trust is a long-term partner of Medtronic and, over our five-year history together, Royal Papworth has been able to use MedPoints to fund a number of solutions for its staff and patients, such as staffing positions, SpaceLabs monitors and larger capital purchases for the electrophysiology labs.

Its most recent MedPoints purchase was a collection of heart monitors: three lead monitors for use over 1-4 weeks, and 12 lead monitors for 24-hour detailed recording. An upgrade from the trust’s previous technology in terms of level of detail, ease of use and greater IT security, these can be issued to patients to wear outside of the hospital, obtaining vital heart rhythm information. This can then be downloaded by an analyzer to allow Royal Papworth clinical staff to accurately consider further treatment for their patients. 

Maintaining this good working relationship between Medtronic and Royal Papworth has given the trust the option to continually reinvest their spending into the cardiac department and make their purchases work for them and their patients. They also benefit from regularly reviewing available products on the Medtronic Exchange, making planning for future projects clear and easy.

Another of these projects was with the strategic aim of offering the best staff experience in the NHS. Royal Papworth sought to enable staff to fulfil their potential in a work environment in which they feel valued, with engaging work and a healthy work-life balance. One of their main barriers to achieving this, like many trusts, was constraints with workforce and recruitment, leading to an inability to release staff to undertake training and educational activities.

Alaina Yardley is Principal Cardiac Physiologist for cardiac rhythm management devices at Royal Papworth. She leads a large team of physiologists at different stages of their education, development and qualification. Here, she comments on how MedPoints helped them to revolutionise their staff training and experience:

“I wanted a dedicated training programme in place to nurture and grow the physiologists, so they become highly qualified and have the job satisfaction needed to stay at Royal Papworth. This training time would be protected and was an integral part of their role.

“We have always had excellent training and education support from Medtronic. When they showed us their new education partnership programme (EPP) for cardiac rhythm management devices it looked really good. Its structure and the individual learning plans for the trainees was exactly what we were looking for. The issue we had was due to the constraints that we had with our rota, and it was going to be difficult to release the trainees to undertake the training. Consequently, we didn’t progress it at that time.

“Over the next six months, our Medtronic rep and I looked at ways that it might be possible to free some time for the trainees so that they could start on the EPP. This required two additional components: physiologist workforce resources, and adaptation of the EPP, all alongside having no investment for headcount to create capacity for dedicated training time for the team.

“In collaboration with Medtronic, we were able to sign up to the MedPoints program and received a number of MedPoints which we were able to use to access HR enablement funding. This funding covered a new physiologist post to enable our current trainees to attend one half-day training in person, plus three half days online a month, completing work set on the syllabus - ultimately making the project viable and successful.

“I believe this project and the use of MedPoints has supported our strategic aim of enabling staff to fulfil their potential, helping us achieve the goal to offer the best staff experience in the NHS.”