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Hospital Discharge

February 6, 2017

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NHS Improvement visit CHS Healthcare hospital discharge service in Burton

We were pleased to welcome a delegation from NHS Improvement to visit our hospital discharge service for Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

We have been running a hospital discharge service in Burton since October 2014, supporting hospital discharge by co-ordinating home care packages and helping families to choose care homes.

The delegation from NHS Improvement was comprised of Luke Edwards, Director of Sector Development, Andrew Edmunds: Community and Mental Health Implementation Lead and Nadia Yegorova-Johnstone, Economic Adviser, Provider Efficiency.

This visit from NHS Improvement in December 2016 follows Lord Carter’s visit to another of our hospital discharge schemes in Surrey, which took place a month earlier.

At Burton Hospital, the NHS Improvement Team were shown an audit carried out by Julie Wainwright, co-ordinator at Burton, focusing on patients with the longest length of stays and the reasons for these delays.

“The audit showed the wide range of causes and complexity of arranging discharge for patients with the longest delays,” explained Julie, who discussed the audit with the NHS Improvement Team.

“Notably, just finding all the relevant information for each individual was challenging, with many different professional teams involved across different services and information held in different places. Just building a ‘full picture’ for each individual was challenging and time-consuming.”

The team also shared their personalised approach to co-ordinating home care packages and how this has helped to address challenges with capacity.

“We have a member of our team who is dedicated to the domiciliary care side of the service,” explains Julie. “She speaks to the home care providers, rather than working by emails, and has built up a really good relationship. This means they now call us to inform us about their capacity levels and where we have a challenging discharge, we have the relationship with care providers so we can work together and to a solution, even when there are pressures on capacity.”

Luke Edwards, Director of Sector Development for NHS Improvement, commented on the visit: “It was really helpful to speak to Richard, Julie and team to understand the work that they do, and get their sense of the challenges across the wider pathway both locally and from a national perspective.”
Dr Richard Newland, chief executive of CHS Healthcare said: “We are delighted that the quality and value of our hospital discharge services are very widely recognised by Lord Carter and NHS Improvement.

“The visits to Surrey and Burton were a great opportunity to demonstrate all we do in detail; to show all work needed to achieve a timely complex discharge, the quality of our reporting and how we consistently meet our key performance indicators.

“We value our partnership with Burton Hospitals and were very pleased that NHS Improvement were able to come and see one of our schemes at ‘ground level’. Thank you to everyone involved.”

As originally seen on LinkedIn

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