A ground-breaking logistics project in Sweden has increased the amount of time nurses spend with home-care patients by 40% while achieving a dramatic reduction of costs by cutting the distance covered by 25%. This was all achieved using a UK logistics routing and scheduling solution, LogiX, from DPS International, without an increase in the total working time of the staff.
Paul Palmer, CEO of DPS International believes that the NHS could improve efficiency of nurses and healthcare workers in many areas in the UK if they were to learn from the experience and expertise applied by leading logistics companies and now in Sweden. “Experience from other businesses, who work within the logistics field, shows that the results achieved with vehicle routing software are not always taken seriously as they seem too impressive. However, now that the new planning system has been successfully integrated into the daily work, and they’ve actually seen the benefits, they don’t want to go back to the old way of planning”, Mr Palmer said.
For the last year, Röra a Swedish home-help service in the health sector, based in the municipality of Mark, have been planning nurses and home-help transport and services with the route scheduling and optimisation system, LogiX, from UK company DPS International. The results have been outstanding. The number of kilometres driven by the home-help service in the district has been reduced by approximately 25% and the efficient working time increased by 40%, without increasing the total number of working hours.
The total efficient working time has increased from 52% in 2005 to 73% in 2006. Orust is now expanding the logistic system to another district that has great potential to achieve the same results that have been accomplished in Röra. This is comparable to the best results achieved in more traditional market applications of vehicle routing.
Because of the success of the home nursing and home-help project, Mark municipality is looking at the introducing a support system to revolutionise the way resources are planned in the home-help services. One possibility that is also being discussed is to centralize the planning function. The planning function may even be able to handle other travel services such as business travel, as well as regular transport of goods in the municipality activity. Mark municipality has created an administration that among other duties is used to supervise all vehicles within the municipality.
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