The pilot will spread to two more wards.
An experiment with evening outpatient clinics in Calder’s northern wards has cut waiting lists for routine appointments by more than half in nine months, and health managers confirmed this week that the scheme will be extended to the Ardle and Harrow Moor wards from the new year.
The pilot began in February at the Northgate Health Centre and the outpatient wing of St Columba’s Hospital, where consultants and nurses agreed to run clinics between 5.30pm and 9pm on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. At the start, 4,180 patients in the northern wards had been waiting more than eighteen weeks for a first appointment in dermatology, orthopaedics, ear, nose and throat services or gynaecology. By the end of October that figure had fallen to 1,930.
Why the evenings worked
Managers had expected the extra clinic hours to help. What surprised them was the drop in missed appointments. Under the daytime system, roughly one patient in eight failed to attend, often because they could not leave work or arrange childcare. In the evening sessions that rate fell to one in twenty-five, meaning each clinic saw almost every patient booked into it.
Staff were recruited on a voluntary basis and paid at an enhanced rate, funded from a regional fund for reducing backlogs. The trust also kept the hospital pharmacy and the X-ray department open until 9pm on clinic nights, so that patients did not have to return another day for a scan or prescription.
“We were not inventing new medicine. We were simply seeing people at a time when they could actually come. The biggest change was in men between thirty and fifty, who had been putting off appointments for years because of work,” said Dr Hamid Qureshi, the consultant dermatologist who led the pilot.
Dr Qureshi said the clinics had also picked up several serious conditions earlier than they might otherwise have been found, including a number of skin cancers that were treated within weeks of the first appointment.
What patients said
A survey of 1,200 patients who attended evening sessions found that 91 per cent rated the experience as good or very good, and 78 per cent said they would have struggled to attend a daytime clinic. Bus operators added two late services on the northern loop to coincide with the end of clinics, after early complaints that patients leaving at 9pm faced a long wait for transport.
Joan Ferris, 54, a care worker from Northgate, had waited fourteen months for an orthopaedic appointment about a knee injury. She was seen on a Wednesday evening in April and had surgery in July. “I had cancelled twice before because I could not get the shift covered,” she said. “This time I went straight from work, and I was home by eight.”
The next two wards
The extension will begin in January at the Ardle Community Hospital and in March at the Harrow Moor Health Centre. Between them, the two wards have around 3,600 patients waiting more than eighteen weeks. The trust plans to add cardiology and respiratory clinics to the evening rota, alongside the four specialties already covered, and will run Saturday morning sessions on a trial basis in Ardle.
Not everyone is convinced the model can be stretched indefinitely. The regional branch of the nurses’ union welcomed the results but warned that the pilot depended on goodwill from staff working extra hours, and said the scheme should be built into normal rotas rather than relying on overtime. Trust managers said they were in talks about permanent contracts for evening teams and would publish a fuller evaluation in the spring.
The City Hall health committee is due to discuss the findings at its December meeting. Councillors from the southern wards have already asked why their residents, some of whom face waits of similar length, were not included in the second phase. Officials said the northern wards had been chosen because they had the longest lists, and that further expansion would depend on the next round of funding.
