Evaluation and Refinement for lung cancer clinic preparation

Abstract

Introduction The number of treatments for patients with lung cancer has significantly increased in recent years with better outcomes. This places increased pressure to run a streamlined and efficient service. The cornerstone to the delivery of efficient care is ensuring clinics are planned so that patients attend the right appointments with results reported. This 'clinic prep' is time consuming for clinical staff who are time poor. Aim(s): We wanted to establish the impact and resource required to prepare clinics and develop an intervention to overcome inefficiencies. Methods A baseline survey was completed by clinical staff that evaluated the time commitment and clinician's feelings on this process and a tech-enabled solution implemented to save time in clinic preparation. Results 39 responses were received. All of the respondents prepared at least 1 clinic per week and 67% prepared >=2. 41% spend?>2 hours each week on this. Identifying scans awaiting reports and highlighting them to radiology was the most common task (>90%). 56% stated >=5 scans were not reported per clinic. Two thirds of respondents checked that clinic appointment and treatment date are synchronised and 77% checked for pathology results. Satisfaction with the process was low, 40% feel it is a poor use of their time or skill set. Conclusion The results of our survey highlight the significant time burden on clinicians to effectively prepare clinics. A webpage-based tool was developed to automate the information gathering part of the process, avoiding a time-consuming review of every patient record. The tool extracts and collates data from our electronic patient record-including scan or pathology report status, treatment dates, and appointment dates- and provides a succinct summary. Assessments are currently underway to evaluate the effect of our intervention including a cost analysis to assess any financial impact. Disclosure No significant relationship. Copyright © 2026 Elsevier B.V.