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Challenge
Guy’s and St Thomas’ has over 2 million patient contacts each year and generates a large volume of outbound mail to support patient communication. Appointment letters and specialist mail, including samples and vaccines, amounting to 76,000 items a week are sent out, representing a significant cost to the Trust. Many communications are time critical, necessitating priority delivery methods that incur high costs. Priority items were being despatched using services provided by the local postal operator, whilst other mail was being franked on-site for second class despatch.
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Solution
Swiss Post Solutions analysed the outgoing mail and identified an approach to creating savings without compromising the service:
- Broadening the range of tariffs available through preparation activities that enable access to postage discounts.
- Careful classification of outbound mail would segregate mail more effectively to ensure premium delivery channels were only used when necessary.
- A staff education campaign to improve production standards that enable access to reduced mail tariffs.
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Benefits
The new standard mail service delivered almost £200k of savings in the first nine months by switching to downstream access delivery. In April 2015 priority mail was switched to franked First Class in place of Business Mail and the combined results generated an additional saving of £382k. To date we have generated savings of £1M, an annualised figure that’s equivalent to 14 Band 5 nurses. As the effects of the education campaign take hold, the proportion of OCR mail will increase and the savings will increase too. The reduction in cost has not affected the delivery timelines, in fact, post arrives on average one day earlier.
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