HOSPITAL chiefs battling bed-blocking and a rising demand for services made some headway during a week of focused activity.

Called a "perfect week", it involved trialling a number of initiatives to improve patient flow and discharge patients more quickly.

Daily ward rounds with executive directors and local GPs took place to review long stay patients while high priority meetings were held and calls made to other care providers in the community to move patients out of the hospital.

Speaking at last week's Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust board meeting, chief operating officer Andy Hyett said: "We entered the perfect week with 56 delayed transfers of care (DToC) patients and we have 404 beds so that's two wards worth. That's the constraint, and a real challenge for us.

"While we saw a slight drop in the the number of bed days lost to DToCs in November and December, last week patients whose transfer of care is delayed added up to just shy of 900 bed days."

The project aimed to increase the number of DToC patients discharged from the hospital to eight every day, decrease the time that a patient with a delayed transfer of care had to wait and decrease the number of 'green to go' patients from 105 to 70.

Mr Hyett said: "We hit the target for the number of DToC patients being discharged as the week progressed and we saw some major impact on trying to move patients through - the question will be sustainability.

"The conclusion it brought us to is we need more capacity outside of the hospital to be able to move patients through."

He added: "We took the opportunity to take a lot of people out of their activities to do some increased focus. Our team will now meet and review actions we took internally to see which bits will continue.

"The week was a step change and the teams responded extremely enthusiastically.

"The whole trust was phenomenally engaged with new ideas and new initiatives. We literally had things we tried on Monday and Tuesday that were stopped by Wednesday and new ideas going forward.

"We had a tremendously busy week last week with medical admissions and I think as a result of some of the [perfect week] actions we were able to get out of one of our escalation areas in endoscopy and stay out over the weekend."

* The hospital was unable to meet the target of decreasing the number of 'green to go' patients, adding it was difficult to give a figure because other patients became 'green to go' throughout the time period.

  • Patients categorised as ‘green to go’ no longer require the specialist services provided within a hospital but may need ongoing treatment at home such as regular visits from district nurses to change wound dressings and catheters. They may also be patients who have been at the hospital for a short while and can go home midweek but are unable to as their family cannot look after them until the weekend.
     
  • Many patients have been waiting for a long time to leave, prevented from doing so because of the shortage of home carers or beds in residential and nursing homes, community hospitals and hospices. These patients require general care, such as help getting up in the morning and going to the toilet, and in the absence of care outside the hospital, they stay in hospital, being known within the NHS as ‘delayed transfers of care’.