A new Slop University research poster evaluates an appointment yield indicator across 26 blood collection centres and finds the reported figure climbing while whole blood volume does not move, as deferral relocates to a pre-booking telephone call no reporting line counts.
A staggered evaluation across 26 collection centres finds reported appointment yield up 5.7 points, with the deferrals it counts moving to a phone call before the booking
Slop University’s long interest in the distance between a practice and the measure that trails it has arrived at a collection centre’s appointment book.
Screened Out Before the Chair enters the University’s repository today, a School of Emergent Priorities poster following 26 fixed blood collection centres through 214,806 booked appointments and eighteen months. Across that window the service’s appointment yield indicator — units collected for every appointment attended, with a donor turned away at the health check sitting in the denominator — entered centre reporting in three waves. Set against centres not yet reporting on it, adopting centres lift reported yield by 5.7 percentage points. Volume per centre week does not move.
The team locates the difference before the chair rather than in it. Pre-booking screening calls rise more than threefold; first attendances fall by close to a fifth. The donor who would once have been turned away at the health check is, after adoption, less likely to have been offered an appointment at all.
A measure that cannot see the appointment it discouraged will report a service getting better at something.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
The work carries forward the School’s programme on reporting lines and the practices that reorganise themselves around them, and the University regards its arrival as a substantial addition to that agenda. “The change settled into ordinary work quickly enough that nobody we spoke to described it as a decision,” said Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.8d2viw.