Trust is earned

Postal services remain a key means of communicating with customers, or in this case, patients. This is especially important in a healthcare setting, where multiple factors must be taken into account that may not apply in other scenarios.

• The need to communicate matters of record e.g., appointments;
• Patient confidentiality considerations (including personal data protection legislation compliance);
• The fact that older patients may be more comfortable with physical mail, and/or may lack email access;
• Enabling effective communications with patients who may not speak/read English; and
• The pressing need to optimise hospital trust budgets by saving money without compromising on the quality of service outcomes.

The customer requirement was to speed up delivery times on essential communications, whilst still ensuring that the bespoke service offering meets the needs of the hospital trust. The developed solution would also need to be exceptionally cost-effective.

The hospital trust gave Northern Mail the task of devising an efficient solution that would ensure postal collection from 14 different sites, with collected mail items then being introduced into the Royal Mail’s processing and delivery workflows.

All 14 sites would need to be allocated equal priority, and the same SLA would apply across all sites. KPIs would include the timeliness and efficiency of the collection services, and the amount of money that we could save the customer.

Northern Mail was able to draw on our years of specialist experience to devise a postal collection service that met all of the customer’s needs. The efficiency of the service is such that the hospital trust no longer needs to allocate post room resources to sorting or franking outgoing mail.

The outgoing mail collection solution was combined with the collection and delivery of internal mail between the 14 sites in the trust’s network, thereby reducing costs, increasing efficiencies and improving the flow of information between sites.  

Monthly reports provided by Northern Mail to the customer ensure that key metrics are being measured, and performance improvement insights provided. Performance measures include the fact that 98% of mail is now delivered within Royal Mail’s stated first class post timeframes.

As mentioned, a key part of the challenge posed by the customer was saving funds and optimising spend on mailing services. The implementation of the Northern Mail solution resulted in an immediate saving for the customer of some £165 000 in postage charges, as well as an estimated additional saving of £25 000 per year in franking machine costs.

As a result of the success of this solution, multiple other local hospital trusts are now using similar solutions from Northern Mail, thereby proving that our service offering is both replicable and scalable.

Key factors underlying this success included:

• Years of experience in devising tailormade mail collection solutions
• Taking the time to understand our client’s challenges and needs
• Rather than an off-the-shelf solution, we devised a bespoke approach that met and even exceeded our customer’s requirements
• Our innovative approach added value to the solution over and above what the customer was originally looking for
• We generated additional savings, in both the short- and long-term
• Our solution helped the client to re-allocate internal resources
• We enabled increased efficiencies
• Our reporting protocol enabled the customer to make more informed management decisions
• Delivery times for all external mail items were significantly improved

In summary, our solution delivered improved results at lower costs, and was entirely aligned with the hospital trust’s goal of providing exceptional patient care at every touchpoint, including through optimised communications.

For postal collection solutions that offer significant, ongoing savings, contact Christine on 01912493686 or by email at Christine.appleby@servicegraphics.co.uk