Digitising Hospital Discharge to Assess: A success story in streamlining ward processes and optimising MDT triage
Douglas talks to Charlotte Hamer, Assistant Lead for Hospital Discharge at Blackpool Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust about their successful ‘Integrated Single Point of Discharge’ project that they have implemented at the hospital, using Strata Health’s referral software.
Charlotte explains that by implementing a Single Point of Discharge solution, the discharge process is now much more streamlined and simplified for the ward staff, as they carry out one referral and only one team needs to be contacted.
Charlotte talks us through the amazing outcomes the deployment has demonstrated – such as reducing the length of stay for patients by 4 days, an improved patient flow and an increased utilisation across all pathways as they are able to see what capacity is available when carrying out discharge.
Charlotte talks through some of the problems that the hospital were trying to solve – and how they solved it, namely the need to improve the patient experience of the hospital discharge journey and reduce the length of stay. She explains that there had been a lot of recent investment in community services at the hospital, but these were under utilised at times, and there was confusion among the ward staff as they weren’t sure which service did what or which one was most appropriate to meet patients’ needs.
The project has overcome the problems of getting data from different health and social care systems by using Strata to underpin it, so each patient is jointly triaged by both a health and social care professional. Charlotte explains how this truly holistic approach, is easy to access and manage and it’s enables wards to pull through patient demographics quickly and easily.
Charlotte says: ‘We needed a system that would be able to support us with bringing together lots of different pathways and processes and that’s where Strata came in – to provide that referral management patient flow system, which not only acts as the referral but also as a data collection. It can produce reports for us that we can put into daily and monthly dashboards which demonstrate the progress we have made and informs our future Improvement plans.’
‘By taking away the responsibility of doing the discharge planning, acute staff now have more free time to look after poorly patients.’
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