HDR UK Event
Join our series of expert webinars on how to tackle waiting lists - one of the most urgent challenges facing the NHS.
Explore the core issues
HDR UK invites you to take part in a series of free online webinars ahead of our Waiting List Conference 2026: From Backlog to Breakthrough on 16-17 September.
With waiting lists in England alone at seven million, the conference is a shared call to action. The ELAB webinars explore many of the core issues being addressed at the two-day event. Reserve your place right away.
The webinars
Webinar 1: Bring your waiting lists to life with the NHSR Waiting list Package
This online session led by Tom Smith, Head of Activity Analysis & Forecasting at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, gives an overview of some of the “facts” about waiting lists that are useful for NHS analysts to understand.
We’ll show how the R package implements these facts, and how various functions within the package can be used to turn raw waiting list data and histograms into actionable information. There is a surprising amount of “signal” hidden in your waiting list data – this session will help you draw it out and bring your waiting list data to life!
- Monday, Sep 7, 1pm – 2pm.
Webinar 2: Understanding efficiency, scheduling and capacity in operating theatres
Join Jaideep Pandit, Professor of Anaesthesia at the University of Oxford, for a session on understanding “efficiency” in the context of open theatres. He will discuss how most meaningfully to measure efficiency in the context of operating theatres, specifically rejecting surrogate metrics like starting on time or utilisation. The session will then focus on how best to achieve efficiency, which is to schedule accurately. In the final part it will consider what is meant by capacity in the context of operating theatres, and how to plan for it for both elective and emergency theatres. The lecture will challenge many embedded notions and offer working examples to help the audience understand the principles.
- Tuesday, Sep 8, 11am-12pm.
Webinar 3: Adapting the NHSR Waiting list Package for Community Waits and Other Areas
Learn how Simon Wellesley-Miller, a Senior Analytical Manager with the NHS England Southwest Intelligence and Insights Team, used the NHS-R Waiting List package to model waiting times across community services, from deriving required metrics, conducting analysis, and producing waiting list metrics and visuals in an approachable report. This webinar will show the overall workflow, highlight some of the challenges in the data and how these were overcome. We will be delving deeper into the code, which should allow an understanding of how the package was utilised and how it could be adapted for other purposes.
- Tuesday, Sep 8, 2pm-4pm.
Webinar 4: The Modeller’s Dilemma: How the Busyness of an EMS System Changes What Matters
Omda Readiness team has been helping EMS and firefighting organisations across the world through discrete event simulation (DES) modelling for more than 25 years to help them make the best possible decisions when it comes to improving their effectiveness and efficiency. Tef Jansma explores how the EMS sector has changed dramatically during this period.
Decades ago, many EMS organisations looked more like taxi companies than organisations managing a entire prehospital pathways from call to care. These days, some EMS organisations are responsible for managing entire teams taking phone calls, triaging callers into the right priority, and ideally trying to help lower priority callers over the phone. For higher priority calls, when it comes to physically responding with vehicles, there are many different response models these days as well.
While EMS organisations still differ in size, scope, and response models, one factor has changed for almost all of them: they have become much busier, both in terms of the absolute number of patients they help, as well as their vehicle use. Tef will look at how the increased workload of EMS organisations keeps presenting new challenges for DES modellers – not only in terms of technical complexity and scope, but also from an ethical/societal point of view.
- Wednesday, Sep 9, 11am-12pm.
Webinar 5: Elective Patient Pathways (EPP) Dataset
This session is led by Emma Silvey, an analyst in the elective recovery analysis and modelling at NHS England and Sandra Rochfort, a senior analyst in elective recovery analysis and modelling at NHS England.
The Elective Patient Pathways (EPP) dataset links Secondary Uses Service (SUS) activity data with the Waiting List Minimum Dataset (WLMDS). By combining activity and waiting list records, the dataset enables analysis of care both within and around RTT pathways, offering a richer view of elective patient journeys.
This technical webinar will outline the methodology used to construct the dataset, including key linkage approaches and considerations for managing incomplete or inconsistent records while preserving pathway completeness.
- Wednesday, Sep 9, 1pm.
Webinar 6: Understanding Waiting Lists Using Simple Metrics
Tineke Poot introduces Little’s Law as a practical starting point for analysing elective waiting lists, linking the number of people waiting, the rate at which patients are treated, and the time they wait. By connecting the theory to familiar applied measures such as Referral to Treatment (RTT) clearance time, we will show how this simple rule can be used in the NHS to inform performance and planning discussions before analysts turn to more complex modelling.
- Thursday, 10 September, 2pm- 3pm.
Webinar 7: NHSR Waiting list Package in Practice: Modelling RTT Achievements and Misses
This session, led by Amy Makawana, Data Scientist, Analysis & Forecasting Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, examines how her team has applied the NHSR Waitinglist package. It will walk through practical waiting list scenario modelling that quantifies the capacity increases required to meet RTT targets – and shows what is likely to happen if no action is taken. The sessions will provide dummy data and the code to enable you to follow along and take this away to modify for your own data and challenges.
- Thursday, Sep 10, 11am-12pm.
- Hosted by
Online
- Booking
- Add to Calendar