The Delivery plan for tackling the COVID-19 backlog of elective care highlighted that long waits before accessing planned care can have life-long consequences on the development of children and young people (CYP).
A delivery group has been formed bringing together the national Elective Recovery Programme, the Children and Young People’s Transformation Programme and stakeholders to accelerate progress and ensure the recovery of paediatric services keeps pace with recovery of adult elective care.
This toolkit has been developed by the group and sets out actions that regions, systems and providers should take to accelerate CYP recovery and reduce the elective activity gap between CYP and adults.
Minimum delivery expectations checklist for CYP elective recovery
To ensure parity of service between CYP and adult elective care, there are short and long term actions that should be carried out across regions, integrated care boards (ICBs), provider collaboratives, operational delivery networks, Children’s Hospital Alliance and providers. Local determination will identify which organisation will be responsible for completion and assurance.
Regions, systems and providers should have recovery plans and actions in place to return CYP activity levels to a minimum of 2019/20 rates (dependent on previous delivery and baselines) and ensure a reduction in waiting lists.
A downloadable version of the checklist is available here.
Governance and oversight
All regions are asked to set up a dedicated CYP elective recovery oversight group, reporting directly to a regional elective recovery board, or, ensure CYP features as a standing agenda item at existing regional elective recovery boards.
Disaggregated data on CYP elective recovery should be reported at all levels of elective recovery governance, and as part of wider NHS performance reporting arrangements. CYP activity should be correlated back to tiered trusts, as part of the long waits work, where applicable.
Using CYP data
A CYP elective recovery dashboard has been developed to support CYP elective recovery. It provides greater visibility of CYP data, helping identify and address key challenges and monitor progress.
To access the data, please contact: england.cyptransformation@nhs.net with the subject ‘CYP ER & WL dashboard’.
Data and local intelligence should be used to understand key challenges across paediatric specialties and pathways, and to agree actions required to increase paediatric elective activity and reduce CYP waiting times.