University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust are using MCO as part of an Enhanced Supportive Care (ESC) project to get advanced visibility of Quality of Life data from patients who are asked to register by oncology colleagues prior to a referral to palliative care.

Patients are asked to complete the 30-item EORTC QLQ-C30 cancer Quality of Life assessment every two weeks in MCO, or as often as is useful, with results then immediately available to both the ESC team and the patient’s referring oncology team in real-time. This provides the opportunity for the ESC team to potentially prioritise their restricted capacity and act to intervene in a patient’s care earlier than might otherwise have been possible.

The first 15 months have seen hundreds of patients with various tumour types being referred from across the 30 or so oncologists at the Trust. As well as proving successful in terms of the Quality of Life impact for patients and helping teams to more effectively and efficiently prioritise resources, it is projected that significant financial savings could be released from the reduction in acute admissions - in fact, scenario modelling of the savings identified from just one patient to the overall savings if a single similar patient was to benefit per week, estimates a total saving of £500k per year.