We are making real improvements for patients – reducing the unacceptable times patients are waiting for emergency and planned care.
What have we done?
In August, we opened two additional Rapid Assessment and Treatment Spaces; relocated and expanded our Same Day Emergency Care service, and created a 22 bed Medical Receiving Unit. This supports a new model of caring for patients who arrive as emergencies. In addition, we have have recruited a total of 5 new consultant Emergency Physicians who will focus on supporting the afternoon and evening rota in the Emergency Department.
In August we have:
- Reduced hours lost to ambulance handovers from consistently over 6,000 to 2,500 hours
- Achieved our 4-hour improvement trajectory meaning nearly 68% of patients are seen, treated and admitted or discharged within four hours
- Reduced the time to treatment for patients in the Emergency Department by an hour
- Reduced the time to admission for patients by three hours
- Seen a 33% reduction in the number of patients waiting over 12 hours for admission
- Seen an improvement in quality metrics within the Emergency Department. There has been a reduction in falls and hospital acquired pressure ulcers. Patient experience has also shown an improvement for the first time in several months with improved Friends and Family Test scores; an increase in compliments and a reduction in complaints
- Implemented changes for patients presenting with a fractured neck or femur (broken hip). In the summer months an average of 40 patients per month presented with this problem
- We saw a reduction in ambulance waits from 3 hours to 1 hour; a reduction in time to surgery from 42 hours to 32 hours and a reduction in length of stay from 14 days to 8.8 days.
This is all despite continued increases in emergency demand (the number of patients arriving as emergency cases) of 5.8% year to date.
Our Chief Executive Mark Hackett said: “I would like to thank all the staff and teams for leading, implementing and sustaining this improvement. Their commitment is both humbling to see and remarkable alongside our wider changes in the One Plan for improvement. I want to continue to thank our teams at all levels for the extraordinary efforts they are making to improve the organisation and its central purpose around delivery of high-quality care, excellent research, education and training. We still have further to go for our patients but this is great progress.”
Graph: More patients arriving in our urgent and emergency areas are being seen, treated and admitted or discharged within 4 hours.
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