Five health and social care providers in North West London have been selected to receive dedicated support to test cutting-edge innovations addressing challenges linked to demand for urgent and emergency care, long length of stay in hospital, and hospital discharge.
The Implementation Sites were selected following an open call as part of North West London’s wider ambition to enable more days at home for residents, with the right support for them and their families. The call was run by Imperial College Health Partners (ICHP) as the innovation partner for NHS North West London.
The successful Implementation Sites will be supported with additional resource and capability to test and implement innovative technologies, pathway design, and care models with the potential to solve key challenges around the flow of patients in acute care settings and the barriers to getting them back home. Sites will work as part of an integrated, multi-disciplinary team with NHS North West London and ICHP colleagues to understand and evaluate what’s working, with the aim of spreading impactful innovation more widely.
Wave one Implementation Sites include:
- Ealing Borough Based Partnership (BBP)
- Imperial College Healthcare Trust
- The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS FT
- Chelsea & Westminster Hospital NHS FT
- Tri-borough ASC Hospital Discharge Teams
Focussed on addressing challenges linked to urgent and emergency care demand, Ealing BBP Implementation Site will focus on proactive interventions for identified patient cohorts to reduce high demand for UEC services. It will focus on patients with frailty, including dementia.
Imperial’s Integrated Care Directorate (Discharge and Therapies) and Hillingdon’s Transformation & Improvement and Unplanned Care Teams, will look at how we can predict patients most likely to be at risk of long length of stay in hospital. Using data science and artificial intelligence, this will then support implementation of proactive interventions, helping the teams and acute wards where long length of stay is a particular challenge.
Hillingdon and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and Tri-borough ASC Hospital Discharge Teams are focusing on implementation of technology solutions to optimise discharge coordination by a) supporting the collaboration of teams across multiple settings, and b) providing an improved pathway which connects patient need with the most suitable care provider.
Matthew Chisambi, ICHP’s Interim Director of Strategy and lead for the North West London Mission to enable more days at home, said:
“Extensive engagement with the North West London sector – including system leaders, frontline staff, and patients – coupled with in-depth data analysis, has identified where innovation has the greatest potential to ultimately enable our residents to spend more days at home, with the right support for them and their families.
“We are incredibly excited to be working with these first six sites to test and implement innovation to support proactive demand prevention for urgent and emergency care services, predictive long length of stay, and discharge coordination optimisation. Our hope is that we can scale what works across North West London so that more people can benefit, and achieve our ambition of enabling 50,000 residents to spend 180,000 more days at home by 2026.”
Noel Burkett, Director at The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, one of the six Implementation Sites focused on predicting patients at risk of long length-of-stay, said:
“It’s very important for a patient’s care that they don’t stay in hospital for longer than they need to. We need to understand why they are staying in hospital as long as they are, and understand what we need to do to reduce that length of stay. We need to get them into the right place, the right environment as soon as possible.”
Jen King, Head of Integrated Discharge at Hillingdon Health and Care Partnership, one of the six Implementation sites focused on optimising discharge coordination, said:
“We need to prioritise discharge coordination because the patient’s journey is at the heart of everything we do and without keeping their journey moving and on track it will cause unnecessary delays, meaning they’re unable to return home as quicky as possible, and their recovery could be delayed.”
Read more about the North West London Mission for enabling more days at home here.
Find out more about North West London’s Mission-led approach to Research & Innovation here.
