How Outsourcing is Powering Efficiency

Trusts now need to set out both activity and costs, identifying improvement plans and actions. Finding efficiencies, across both clinical and non-clinical services, is becoming a more pressing requirement. Now more than ever, the use of technological advancements and model innovations is essential to meet the unrelenting front door, workforce and estate demands.

Half of hospitals are finding outsourcing can help, having partners by their side every day to do some of the heavy lifting, relieving the non-clinical burden, modernise delivery and unlock value streams. Together working to optimise and power efficiency.

If approached strategically, outsourcing will become a platform for innovation and a catalyst for continuous improvement. In fact, ‘The Future of Outsourcing and Partnerships in UK Health and Care’ report by Aiming for Health Success³ has outlined that correctly structured outsourcing partnerships can deliver:

• Cost control in an inflationary environment
• Faster access to capital
• New methods to meet capacity and reduce pressure on existing staff
• Freed-up management time to focus on clinical challenges
• Innovative practices and expertise to improve services.

Here we share just a few examples of some of the ways our teams at Sodexo have used our innovative facilities management services, developed with local experts and global experience and best practice, to help support healthcare organisations with their aims and objectives…

Xempla: Holistic Coverage on Asset Performance Management

In its ‘Assets In Action’ guide for non-technical managers⁴, NHS Estates have stated that asset management – which manages physical assets such as equipment, buildings and land – is important for organisations to reduce the costs which are tied with these assets.

They also point out that it is a crucial step for increasing the quality of the services which these assets help to facilitate.

With the Xempla Decision Automation System, organisations are able to:

1. Increase efficiency
2. Improve their sustainability practices and reduce energy consumption
3. Make cost savings
4. Avoid critical asset failure.

This intelligent and collaborative asset performance management software, which is fully integrated into our existing systems, allows users to come to smarter decisions as well.

Our work at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) is a great example to showcase our partnership with Xempla. In under three years since we implemented the technology at one of the UK’s largest acute NHS Trusts, MFT recorded:

• 135 asset early lifecycle events avoided
• 110 critical asset outages and prevented
• Electrical energy consumption dropping by 1.5million KWh
• More than £440,000 being reduced in energy costs
• Over 3,000 tonnes less carbon being released into the atmosphere.

WasteWatch: Dietitian-Approved Menus, Saving Food & Money

Sodexo's partnership with apetito provides our most extensive range of nutritionally driven, dietitian-designed menus, delivered through a robust and resilient supply chain. Outsourced dining solutions clearly relieve the burden on frontline ward teams, thus improving staff wellbeing, patient satisfaction and recovery.

Equally our WasteWatch programme provides our teams with an effective system of tracking and measuring food waste. By monitoring this issue, generating visibility and awareness of left over food quantities, in turn reducing waste levels, helping Trusts reduce carbon emissions and powering efficiency.

When WasteWatch was embraced by the Sodexo team, the initiative saved 59,000kg of hospital, retail and patient dining food waste in 2023 alone. This was achieved through a combination of achieving less counter, customer plate and production waste.

Traczo: Improving the Efficiency of the Portering Service

Here at Sodexo, we aim to provide clinical teams with the best non-clinical care through our hospital portering services too. Traczo, our innovative portering management solution, can increase porters’ productivity and create efficiencies across NHS Trusts.

This digital, Wi-Fi based patient tracking system can quickly and easily match porters to a list of jobs – optimising labour. As tasks are allocated automatically to the nearest available porter, response times can be reduced significantly.

When Traczo was introduced to the Royal Exeter & Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust for use at North Devon District Hospital (NDDH), it helped the organisation to achieve the following:

• The number of completed tasks increased by 26.1% year-on-year
• Productivity of porters increasing by 20%
• Task response time improved by 14%
• The average completed tasks per hour increased by 9%
• The KPI success rate increased by 0.33%.

Sodexo’s experience of delivering outsourcing across asset performance management, food waste and portering shows how the right partner can deliver with measurable improvements in efficiency and sustainability. 

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