The increase in demand for services and the pressure this puts on both hospital and community services is something we are all familiar with.
Over the past nine months the partnership has been working on a data dashboard which monitors that demand in real time and indicates where there is capacity in the system to help ease the pressure.
The dashboard is fed into by several organisations across the partnership on a daily basis providing real-time information on data such as how many people are medically stable for discharge, how many intermediate care placements or care home beds are available or how many referrals the community call centre is receiving.
This allows decision makers to identify where the pressure points are and work together to identify where patients can be discharged to or hospital admissions avoided, making sure people are safe, and getting the right support in the right place. It also enables barriers to discharge to be identified, highlights where more resources are needed and allows for staff to be redeployed into areas where extra support is required.
Matthew Dodd, Director of Transformation for the partnership said: “We have already begun to see the benefits of the system with the Medically Stable for Discharge list hitting its lowest figure for Walsall of 15 in December 2021. The Manor Hospital was also recently hailed as an “exemplar of best practice” by the West Midlands Ambulance Service Board of Directors for rapid handover of patients at the hospital. This would not be possible without the flow of patients out of the hospital into community services, something which this dashboard underpins.”
Work is now on-going to strengthen the data sources to support and drive our move to a population health management approach.
