Southern Health Trust ‘confident’ winter care plan will improve patient flow and speed up hospital discharges
Ahead of another challenging winter for Emergency Departments, a senior Southern HSC Trust director has highlighted the timely care programme being rolled out to improve efficiency within its hospitals.
The focus is on better ambulance handovers, avoiding unnecessary admissions, improving flow, speeding up discharge, and strengthening care in the community.
Speaking at Thursday’s (November 27) Southern Health and Social Care (HSC) Trust board meeting, director of Planning, Performance and Informatics, Elaine Wilson expressed confidence the Trust would be better prepared to cope with winter pressures, and she referred in particular to Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry, where she says the timely care approach is already paying off.
She commented: “The key focus is on the timely care programme that was set up in 2024. Really the most important thing in the winter, is ensuring that we get flow.
“We looked at three areas in relation to prevention of people attending our Emergency Departments, [by providing] better services in the community where we can.
“We looked at the admissions in terms of the appropriate admissions into our hospitals and looking at other pathways, we looked at the flow across the hospital network, and getting people through our beds in the most efficient way possible, and we looked at the discharge in terms of trying to get people out of the hospitals as quickly as possible.
“So, that programme of work has certainly been developing over the last year, so it’s not that we start Winter Planning a few months before winter now, it’s an all-year process, and we have been keeping that going throughout the whole year, and taking our learning from last year.
Funding Allocation
“One of the very significant improvements this year was in relation to the funding allocation. The Southern Trust would always hold a proportion of money to deal with winter pressures.
“Last year, we used £1.7m, largely for our timely care investment. This year, [we have received] ring-fenced money for our timely care programme, that’s £2.9m and that’s recurrent. It’s really important that it’s recurrent, because it allows us to embed [the programme] as business as usual.
“Those teams can start to really build and learn, and improve what they’re doing, so we hope that will start to help us deal with some of these very significant pressures that we see throughout the whole year, but obviously they escalate during the winter.
“That’s allowed us to look at how that money could be used to step things up over the winter period.
“We know over the winter period we will need additional bed capacity, we will need additional staffing, so as we go into those very difficult winter months, we will be stepping up the number of beds that we have and staffing those beds, but also ensuring that we have additional capacity within the community.
“We are looking at beds within Daisy Hill [Hospital], beds within Craigavon [Area Hospital], beds within South Tyrone [Hospital] (…) and also looking at our other residential accommodation [facilities], and other places for people to be cared for.
“We’re also looking at additional staffing to ensure we keep our discharges flowing over the weekends, and particularly over that very difficult period [when we have] two bank holidays within a week.
“In Daisy Hill we can see that the flow is really improving and the statistics are getting much better, our ambulances are getting turned around and there is much less corridor care. We do really believe that timely care is the right thing to do, we believe it’s something that will help us with our winter.
“We have a long way to go to embed all of the new practices, and to get all of those things working exactly the way that we would want to, and we always have to recognise the fact that the population is getting older and sicker, and we have much more demand on our services, and it’s only going to get worse.
“This is absolutely the right thing to do. Will this plan mean we can absolutely be sure no patient will ever end up being cared for in a corridor? No, we’re unlikely to get that assurance, however this is the right thing to do to try to minimise that.”
François Vincent, Local Democracy Reporter