Synertec’s partnership with
The Royal Free Hospital London
"Helpful, understanding and supportive."
Synertec work with The Royal Free Breast Screening service to provide a Hybrid Mail solution and text message appointment reminders. This means we can distribute their communications to their citizens across multiple channels, particularly focusing on SMS Breast screening appointment reminders. This supports all 6 breast screening services throughout the London administration.
What is being done?
In December of 2020, in light of the fast-changing environment of COVID-19, the Royal Free Hub Team wanted to change and improve invitation methods to continually adapt to the challenging landscape within Breast Screening. This led to the increasing focus of health promotion around appointment uptake. The need for this is corroborated by the British Journal of Cancer who state a direct link between uptake and attendance:
“Women who received a text message reminding them about their breast cancer screening appointment were 20% more likely to attend than those who were not texted.”
With the inception of an initial contract between Synertec and The Royal Free Hospital London (RFH) 10 years ago, a foundation of mutual understanding and knowledge of our bespoke Prism software laid solid groundwork, enabling a new project to support the Trust’s SMS communications.
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Women who received a text message reminding them about their breast cancer screening appointment were 20% more likely to attend than those who were not texted.
- British Journal of Cancer
How Does It Work?
To complete the setup process, this required our dedicated team at Synertec to implement SMS functionality to their already active Prism software, guided by our committed teams, who followed with details to ensure that the users were comfortable using this benefit. Steven Davies of Royal Free Hospital stated that Synertec were “helpful, understanding and supportive” and were “able to adapt as needed” during the process.
The Royal Free Hub team were informed at very short notice that the previous SMS provider was winding down operations, which had the potential to leave a vacuum within London, and an end of text reminder appointments being circulated to clients. RFH’S Key concern going into the project was to ensure that the Trust would be able to continue to facilitate health promotion linked to appointment reminders, and have no disruption to the population across London under these time constraints.
However, the Synertec team were able implement the new project with a quick turnaround and on-board additional SMS appointment reminders to support Breast screening departments across the 6 services. Steven Davies stated that “significant amount of support was provided by the Synertec team to get things set up as quickly as possible; this included support with the 3rd party team from Gov.uk. The result was a new service set up within weeks and no disruption felt across the London population.”
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Significant amount of support was provided by the Synertec team to get things set up as quickly as possible.
- Steven Davies, Royal Free Hospital
Continuing Support
We at Synertec have been able to continually support the Trust in reaching their goals with regard to the positive uptick in appointment attendance and their hybrid communications that we facilitate. Since the second project was initiated to support 1st stage screening appointment reminders, this has developed to the additional benefit of 2nd stage assessment appointment reminders. Our dedicated support over the years has contributed to a streamlined transition process, with this new project achieving continued success.
Key Benefits
The Royal Free Hub team found they were able to achieve their focus of to adapt to the changing landscape of the SMS uptake in relation to breast screening appointment reminders. They have found that the Hub can now facilitate the health promotion linked to appointment text reminders, which has supported their goals to meet the needs of the Breast screening population.
In fact, this solution became critical for supporting the Trust during COVID-19, including their adherence to the change in the invitation method across the national programme. Steven stated that: “The use of text message reminders has increased during COVID and the Synertec contract has facilitated these changes.” Ultimately ensuring that the Hub has been able to deliver on its commitments in supporting the London Breast Screening programmes.
It’s worthy of note that the implementation of the SMS reminder process has seen the level of manual intervention of the Hub reduced. This, during the times of COVID-19, has proven essential to minimise the interaction required for any necessary process in document distribution.
Here at Synertec, we are extremely pleased to support The Royal Free Hospital London and help them realise their goals of rolling out more SMS communications across Breast cancer screening to assist with the proven uptake of attendance to appointments. We look forward to the continuation of our work together.
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