Case Study by Isla Health
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has saved money and given their clinical teams time back through improved theatre efficiency and reduced manual admin via Isla’s Digital Pathway Platform.
By reviewing existing workflows, the Trust identified critical opportunities for optimisation, including targeting manual pre-operative assessments and legacy surgical waiting lists.
Read on to discover how Chelsea and Westminster achieved:
✅ £731,852 saved through operational and clinical efficiency
✅ 57% reduction in on-the-day theatre cancellations
✅ 135+ hours of clinical hours recovered from automating manual triage
✅ 10 miles of travel saved per patient, supporting sustainability
Scaling clinical excellence and efficiency: Lessons from Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust
We know that balancing high-quality care with mounting admin is a constant challenge for clinical teams. Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust shows how the right digital infrastructure turns operational pressure into progress.
By prioritising a digital-first strategy, the Trust has tackled their surgery waiting lists while protecting the time of their 7,500-strong clinical team. The Trust went on to achieve £731,852 in efficiency savings and safely removed over 17,000 patients from theatre waiting lists, through their strategic partnership with Isla.
Here are the three main takeaways from CW’s move to digital automation and how it’s helping them meet 2025/26 national priorities.
Unblocking bottlenecks through automated validation
Legacy waiting lists often become cluttered with patients who no longer need surgery. This adds to your admin burden and hides true demand. To fix this, the Trust moved to automated waiting list validation.
Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust uses automated text messages to check patient status. This lets you focus resources on those with active clinical needs. The process allowed the Trust to identify and safely remove 17,000+ patients and provided them with a much clearer picture of true surgical demand.
1. Increasing capacity with “Green-Light” triage
Mandatory face-to-face pre-operative assessments (POA) for every patient can consume valuable clinic space and block rooms that are needed for complex cases. The Trust transformed this pathway by adopting Digital Health Questionnaires (DHQ) with Isla.
Clinical teams now use a system that automatically tags patient responses based on health risk:
- Green-light patients: Healthy individuals are directly added to the surgical listing, bypassing unnecessary face-to-face POA appointments.
- Complex cases: Patients with comorbidities are flagged for specialist review much earlier.
This shift recovered 135+ clinical hours from manual triage. It also helped achieve a 57% reduction in on-the-day theatre cancellations, as the questionnaire highlighted healthy patients who were able to have surgery at short notice (24-48 hours), making the most of theatre space.
2. Reclaiming time through asynchronous review
By reviewing patient-submitted photos and data asynchronously, the Trust can now do more assessments remotely. This is vital for regional units like Burns, where patients often have long and uncomfortable journeys, for brief check-ins, saving time for both patients and clinical teams.
The Trust has seen significant impacts across multiple specialties:
- Nursing efficiency: Direct wound image uploads saved 14 minutes per nurse, saving Tissue Viability teams 200+ hours in one year. As one Burns Matron at the Trust noted: “If we start using Isla more, we will have empty Wednesdays. This will change the way we work!”
- Maternity care: Readmissions for C-section wound infections dropped by 70%. Mothers can now share photos from home, getting the support they need faster and easier.
- Sustainability: In Dermatology, 10 miles of unnecessary travel was avoided per patient, saving 1.6 tonnes of CO2.
3. A sustainable model for elective recovery
The transformation at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust proves that moving from manual, analogue processes to automated, digital ones helps meet national targets. By replacing manual triage with proactive, remote-first pathways, the Trust gave clinical teams vital time back to focus on patients who need it most.
