Why do we use couriers?
Hospital satisfaction surveys indicate that the level of service satisfaction is much greater with NBS own transport then with external transport (Non NBS drivers), although satisfaction with non NBS is beginning to increase but it is still no where close to NBS own transport. Over the past year we have increased the number of NBS drivers employed by nearly 100 but we still use couriers.
The reason for this is that we only have limited funds and like any part of the NHS we have to make cases for any increase in our funding and these cases whilst revolving round service still need to have sound economic reasoning.
The problem we face is the irregular distribution of demand for transport services, we produce our centres transport rotas and resource numbers based on demand patterns, which will utilise them fully.
Therefore we may have 30 drivers and 18 vehicles at a site to cover 24 hours a day 7 days a week, but it will still not be able to cover the spikes we have in demand and we could not make a sound business case on the basis of spending extra monies on additional NBS drivers and vehicles which would only operate for 3 to 4 hours per day, so to overcome the shortage we use couriers.
The attached graph shows weekly demand for hospital deliveries by Routine and by Ad Hoc by hour.
This pattern off Ad Hocs increasing of an afternoon is duplicated every day and at every centre, peaking at 15:00 to 16:00 hours daily this also coincides with our peak time for collection from Blood Donor Sessions.
We have been aiming in conjunction with Hospital Liaison to reduce this peak by discussing different routine patterns with hospitals.
A further area of courier usage is out of hours,during this period our own NBS resources are primarilly in place to service emergency deliveries(Blue Lights),and we have to manage their usage carefully to avoid putting patients at risk and because demand for our services out of hours can be very low we only have 1 to 2 drivers on duty but ocassionally they can be fully utilised so we have to use couriers to cover ad-hocs.
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