Surge Week was a huge success at ULHT and saw more patients discharged from our hospitals than in previous weeks. We popped along to some of the early bed meetings and also the new daily marketplace sessions to see what impact the week was having.
The idea behind the marketplace is that wards can visit the sessions and talk to teams directly about diagnostics, results, doctor reviews, therapy delays, packages of care or anything else that may be causing a delay in a patient’s ongoing care or discharge.
These daily meetings are a real hive of activity and it was inspiring to see such brilliant teamwork helping to get our patients home as soon as is possible.
Following their success, it has been decided to keep the marketplace running for the next few weeks, pending a review of what we can do better. Times and locations are available from the ops centres.
One of the aims of the surge week was to close as many escalation beds as possible across the three sites. At the start of surge week, there were 41 escalation beds open and by the end of the week this had reduced to just eight.
Deputy Director of Urgent Care Andrew Prydderch said: “I would like to say a massive thank you to all of our staff for their hard work over the last week, it is great to see this rewarded with some brilliant results.
“I would also like to thank all of our health and social care partners for their support. There is still work to be done, but Surge Week has helped to put our hospitals in a much better position which is great news for patients and staff alike.”
It is really important that we keep this momentum moving, which is why the ‘perfect week’ is returning to ULHT from Monday 21 May to Sunday 27 May.
Andrew added: “Surge Week has effectively enabled us to press the reset button and will give us the opportunity to look ahead to the week long initiative in May where we will focus on achieving the best possible operational performance and standard of care and identifying what blockages are preventing some of these things from happening.”
During a previous perfect week in February 2016, the number of patients discharged before midday increased, we treated 85 more day case patients and reduced the number of operations we cancelled by 36% compared to the previous week.
Like before, a big focus will be on ensuring that patients who are well enough to be discharged leave the hospital in the morning and free up beds for those who need them.
We need your support too. Pop the week in your diary and keep it free of non-urgent meetings and stand down non clinical activities to get more staff onto the frontline. We also need some more non-clinical staff to be ward liaison officers and be the link between a ward and the operations centre. Could this be you? For more information and to get involved please email [email protected]