NHS in Lancashire make Winter preparations to free up beds
12,000 people in hospital everyday are ready to go home, but can't leave
Care ‘traffic control’ centres to speed up discharge, extended ambulance hours and extra beds are part of wide-ranging plans to prepare for winter.
The robust new measures, set out at the NHS England board meeting will boost capacity and resilience across the NHS as well as building on the recent improvements in ambulance response times and A&E performance.
Winter preparations have been well underway since the publication of the NHS’s Urgent and Emergency Care Recovery Plan, with over 800 new ambulances set to be in place to deliver 3.4 million more ambulance road hours as well as 5,000 more sustainable hospital beds and hundreds of new virtual wards each month.
Nationally, the NHS will also be announcing a new incentive scheme to encourage local teams to ‘overachieve’ on performance and receive part of a £150m capital fund for 2024/25. Trusts will receive a greater proportion of funding if they achieve an average of 80% A&E four-hour performance in Q4 and have less than 5% of handovers over 30 minutes in the last half of this financial year.
With more than 12,000 patients every day in hospital despite being medically fit for discharge, a nationwide rollout of ‘care traffic control’ centres will provide one stop for staff to locate and co-ordinate the best and quickest discharge options for patients – either at home or into social or community care.
NHS England North West Regional Medical Director Dr Michael Gregory said:
“Across the North West there are regularly 2,000 people in a hospital bed who no longer need the services only a hospital can provide, speeding up their discharge will help the ability for A&Es to see, treat and admit patients quickly.”
“Doing things differently has really made a difference to speeding up getting patients out of hospital to a more appropriate place,” said Dr Gregory.
In the North West all Trusts already have Care Transfer hubs and a new service put in place at Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust earlier this year has already seen positive results.
Last winter in the North West additional acute respiratory infection hubs were created in 70 sites across the region, which were able to deliver an additional 95,000 appointments.
The East Lancashire Hub developed model which helped it deliver more than 9,000 appointments in one of the most deprived areas in the country. In Alder Hey Childrens Hospital a GP was placed in the A&E department triage for respiratory infection presentations.
Since £250million of funding was announced in January to boost capacity and speed up discharge, local NHS areas are on track to create an additional 900 beds.
In the North West, plans are moving at pace to build a new modular ward at Lancashire Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and create capacity by converting office space into ward space at East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust. These will create additional beds to treat patients this winter.
Virtual wards within the North West include services for frailty, acute respiratory infections, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart failure and a number of paediatric virtual wards, which to date have cared for more than 16,000 patients since May 2022.
Local NHS teams will now focus on preparations across a variety of services including mental health, with plans to be put in place to strengthen ambulance response to mental health calls, continue to raise the profile of all-age 24/7 urgent mental health helplines and avoid long lengths of stay in mental health inpatient settings.
North West Ambulance Service also confirms that it will have 46 new emergency ambulances this year, growing the fleet by 28. They are also planning for seven new mental health response vehicles which will be operational by early 2024.
Dr Gregory added:
“This winter we are planning early to ensure we have as much time as possible to prepare. We want patients to receive the right care, in the right place at the right time.”