Christmas staff magazine

The right care, in the right place, by
the right people, at the right time.
As demand for NHS services continues to rise with more people needing our care we
need all parts of our trust to work in a coordinated and consistent way so that people
can flow through the system in the most efficient way for their needs. Lots of work
has been taking place to ensure that we all work together and play our part in
improving patient flow.
1
Patient attends The Northumbria with a serious problem
An overcrowded emergency department runs the risk of delaying the assessment and
treatment of seriously ill patients both inside our hospital and outside by ambulance
services. Our emergency department continues to work hard to improve ambulance
handover times, triage time and our four hour performance target supported by our
ambulatory care teams. All of these are very important to patient experience and care.
The Northumbria
Where will this
patient be
transferred to
safely?
2
Patient requires admission to a specialty ward at The Northumbria
We’ve introduced a number of initiatives to ensure that beds are available earlier in the
day right across the trust and this means we are able to move patients to the right place
and progress their care at the right time. Discharge co-ordinators on wards 9 and 12 at
The Northumbria are helping us to create capacity before 11am and all wards
participate in the full hospital protocol which sees people proactively moved out of the
emergency department at 11am and 4pm. Flow only works if everyone plays their part,
patients need to be able to flow to our general and community hospitals and out into
the community with the support of community services and adult social care.
We see 250 to 300 patients a day in our emergency department at
The Northumbria. Of these we transfer an average of 30 people to
ambulatory care and admit 70 to 80 patients onto specialty wards.
GENERAL HOSPITAL
There’s no bed like your own bed!
4
Patient is well enough to be discharged
We are about to start a pilot, using multi-disciplinary team board rounds, to help
improve communication within teams on wards so that everyone, including the
patient and their family, understands their care and discharge arrangements. This
will take place in our community hospitals and supports all of the work taking
place with local GPs as part of our vanguard programme to further improve out
of hospital care and access to timely advice.
3
Our red and green day pilot aims to ensure people don’t stay in hospital longer than is
necessary. It runs on two wards at North Tyneside and two wards at Wansbeck and will
soon be expanded to cover Hexham. Days are marked green if care has progressed as
we want it to, and red if there are areas where we can improve flow. This is helping us
add value to the time that people spend in hospital, making every hour count and
ensuring that plans are made and diagnostic tests are done in a timely way.
Our community teams, including our Hospital2Home team, are essential in helping
support early discharge (please see page 15).
Thank you all for your work so far and remember everyone’s contribution
really does count in improving patient flow.