Unified Breast Service helping to improve patient experience
UHDB has developed a unified Breast Service across our hospitals that is ensuring our patients with all breast conditions receive quality, equitable care.
The Breast Service consists of both a breast screening and a symptomatic service, which manages referrals directly from GPs for patients with breast symptoms.
Patients receive the same high-quality care across the Trust, with the two Breast Units at Royal Derby Hospital and Queen’s Hospital Burton combining into one service in September 2017.
This move has helped safeguard the future of the breast screening and symptomatic service in Burton, it’s seen the Trust establish a single Breast Multi-Disciplinary Team across all of our hospital sites, and it’s also allowed the Trust to improve patient experience by offering patients a greater choice of where they want to be seen.
The single Breast Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) works across hospital sites to ensure that all UHDB patients receive the same, consistently high level of quality care and treatment. The team includes nine Breast Surgeons, five Consultant Radiologists, four Consultant Pathologists, and one Consultant Practitioner.
One-stop outpatient clinics are held each week at both of the Breast Units in Derby and Burton, with referred patients able to, in one appointment, receive a mammogram and other tests, as well as have a conversation with a Consultant, so as to provide them with support and help diagnose any conditions in a more timely manner.
The clinics see patients from the Screening Service and referrals from GPs for patients with a breast symptom.
Combining our Breast Units resulted in a 45% increase to the number of patients screened for breast conditions by UHDB from 2017 to 2018, with the breast screening service previously being run in Burton by University Hospitals of North Midlands.
It has also resulted in the screening unit growing into one of the top 20 biggest services in the country.
Dr Mark Bagnall, Breast Screening Director, said: “We are absolutely delighted to have been able to safeguard this life-saving service for all of our patients in South Derbyshire and South East Staffordshire. By providing a single clinical and administrative team across our hospitals, we have been able to maintain high clinical standards and standards of cancer detection across the service, while we have also managed to improve patient experience by providing extra breast clinics at our units in Derby and Burton. The amalgamation of our Breast Service has resulted in our staff taking on a lot of extra work, so I’d also like to thank them for their fantastic commitment to providing our patients with quality care.”
Dr Rahul Deb, Breast MDT Lead, said: “The vision for our merged Breast Unit was to be able to deliver a clinically-led service that offered high quality and equitable care across all of our sites. The creation of a unified multi-disciplinary team has been absolutely crucial to this, as it’s helped ensure that we’ve been able to offer the same care to all of our patients, no matter which site they are treated on. We’re exceptionally proud of the service that we provide for our patients and are delighted to see our service grow to cater to the needs of the whole population we serve.”