Royal Surrey Halves Treatment Time for Patients

An innovative new one stop clinic has been launched at the Royal Surrey County Hospital to treat patients with a condition called haematuria.

The clinic is helping to reduce the patient journey from when they first see their GP to a diagnosis of haematuria from 65 days to a maximum of 27 days and usually less. 

Haematuria is a fairly common condition in which people suffer from blood in their urine and there are a number of different causes.  Many people have haematuria without any other related problems.  Often no specific cause can be found, but because haematuria may be the result of a tumour or other serious problem it does need to be investigated.

The one stop clinic now means that patients no longer have to make three or four visits to hospital for appointments, tests and scans.

The new service is set up so the first blood and urine tests are carried out by the patient's GP and following this the GP will then refer the patient to the Royal Surrey's one-stop haematuria clinic where all further tests and scans will take place and patients now receive their results on the same day.

Launching the new service, Urology Clinical Director Mr Raj Nigam said:

"We know that patients do not want to make repeated visits to the hospital and they also want to know as quickly as possible what is wrong with them.  This new service, which involves state of the art imaging, is already helping patients to access our services quickly and is greatly reducing the anxiety of waiting for test results and a diagnosis. 

"The patients who took part in a pilot of the new clinic were delighted with the service and my colleagues and I are very pleased to be able to see and diagnose our patients rapidly and in a single visit."

The new service has been developed as part of the Royal Surrey's Patient's First programme which was launched in May last year to ensure that patients receive outstanding, safe, high quality and compassionate care, which is convenient and easily accessible. 

The team responsible for treating patients with haematuria, which includes clinicians, nurses, radiologists and patient representatives, looked at the current system that patients had to go through and were able to identify a number of opportunities to cut down the waiting time. 

The Patients First programme includes 18 projects, which are looking at a range of issues including patient experience, infection control, the quality of our food and speeding up the discharge process for inpatients.