Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust, together forming the NHS Humber Health Partnership, have launched a transformation project called ‘Flow’ aiming to reduce unnecessary hospital stays and admissions by streamlining “every stage” of the patient journey.
The project will see each stage of patient progress evaluated, with enhanced board rounds aiming to review every patient daily before 10am in order to perform checks around treatment and discharge, and ‘patient packs’ issued within 24 hours of arrival at the hospital to outline expected treatments.
Plans for Flow include deploying technology to support virtual wards for patients with conditions such as heart failure or COPD, along with utilising “specialist AI software” to analyse blood test results and x-ray reports.
Jonathan Lofthouse, group chief executive of the partnership, said that the project “will create meaningful and lasting change to how 1.65 million people in our region receive hospital care. Every stage of the patient’s journey will be evaluated to ensure people receive the best treatment in the right place when they need it.”
Patient flow in focus
What do organisations need most in order to improve patient flow? We asked our HTN audience where their priorities lie – knowledge of where the challenges are, funding for digital tools, improvement in identifying gaps or provision of an organisational real-time situational view? Check out our readers’ views here.
In May, we highlighted plans from NHS England around increasing urgent and emergency care performance, including funding incentives to support front door services and flow through emergency departments.
We also recently hosted representatives from Kent and Medway ICS for a discussion on their operational control centre model, designed to support the operational response to emerging incidents across regional health and care providers.
Also from the region…
HTN covered the news that Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NFT and Hull University Teaching Hospitals launched a new video game designed to help boost recruitment for pharmacy roles, intended to demonstrate to those with an interest in pharmacy how the team operates within a hospital at ward level.
Earlier in the year, HTN reported on an update around Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust’s virtual ward programme, 12 months after the launch.
We’ve also been exploring the digital and data landscape across the ICS regions in 2024 on a region by region basis; click here to check out our coverage of the North East and Yorkshire.
