Over 6000 patients a year are referred to Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital (RD&E) and North Devon District Hospital (NDDH) for fast-track breast symptom diagnosis. The fast-track clinic requires a clinician, a mammography team and a consultant radiologist/radiographer plus support staff. The imaging needs to take place in specialised rooms. As population and awareness of breast cancer increases there are increasing referrals and the current infrastructure at both RD&E and NDDH will not be sufficient to meet future demand. It is therefore necessary to build a new breast diagnostic unit or extend an existing one. It is likely to be prohibitively expensive to build at both NDDH and RD&E. At present specific GP surgeries refer patients to either NDDH or RD&E. However, the two hospitals are now managed as part of a single NHS Trust called RDUH. Each hospital requires breast diagnosis infrastructure on site as it is used for inpatient and emergency admissions as well as for elective diagnosis services so we need at least two breast diagnosis centres but data science may be used to help determine whether there is a value in building a third centre and/or diverting referrals from specific GPs to one of the existing units.
The aim of this project is to determine where additional breast diagnostic services should be placed to minimise overall travel time for patients whilst reducing infrastructure and running costs.
Objectives include the following:
- To map breast referral demand by GP and calculate the weighted average distance and/or travel time from each GP to RD&E, NDDH and a potential central location.
- To calculate the percentage of patients who would benefit from a central location.
- To calculate the shortest distance/travel time from each GP to the three locations and determine the reduction or increase in mileage if patients were diverted from their current default hospital to one of the other two centres.