- Innovative hospital discharge model implemented by Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust amid UK ‘bed blocking’ crisis, where thousands of patients are stuck in hospital
London, UK; [Friday 10th February 2023]: CareLineLive, the all-in-one home care management software provider, has announced the expansion of its partnership with Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust (MSEFT) to free up 60 beds per day of patients that would otherwise remain in hospital awaiting discharge.
With many hospitals in the UK suffering from the ‘bed blocking’ crisis – where patients deemed fit to leave hospital are waiting for social care packages to be arranged – A&E waiting times are increasing and long delays for ambulances are adding to the backlog.
During the height of Covid-19 in 2021, MSEFT first partnered with CareLineLive, which digitises operations such as rostering, client visits and eliminates the need for paper-based administration, to help scale up its Bridging Service. This service provides short term domiciliary care directly to patients leaving hospital, while waiting for the local authority to commission a longer, more sustainable care package. This resulted in over 11,000 bed days being saved between April-November 2021. Subsequently, between April and December 2022 this service alone saved 11,500 bed days.
Building on the Bridging Service, the Trust pioneered a more holistic service in June 2022 called the Southend Enhanced Discharge Service (SEDS). SEDS is a Discharge To Assess Service that provides a full and complete therapy-led hospital discharge assessment at home for Southend residents rather than an assessment being provided by the hospital before discharge. It enables patients to leave hospital sooner with appropriate provision of care at home where they then tend to recover more quickly.
Between June and December 2022, the SEDS service resulted in 5,070 saved bed days which, combined with the Bridging Service, gave a total saving of 16,570 bed days. The projected saving for the year April 2022-March 2023 is predicted to be around 22,000 bed days, equating to 60 beds per day.
John Walter, General Manager of Integrated Care at MSEFT, said: “CareLineLive has helped us take our service into the 21st century. It is a fantastic electronic record solution for any service that has a need for remote patient care in the community. It enables staff to work remotely, document remotely and be scheduled electronically. It has enabled us to improve efficiency, capacity and reimagine patient care.”
“CareLineLive is a great solution if you want to be more efficient, transform your services and future proof your ways of working and delivering patient care. It helps services be more sustainable, be more GDPR compliant and mitigate against data issues. It is also scalable and functions in real time so we always have an up-to-date assessment of what is happening with each patient.”
Josh Hough, Founder and MD at CareLineLive, added: “We’re proud to be working with MSEFT to help ease the backlog and free up a significant amount of bed spaces, so that more patients can receive the care that they need. We recently put out a freedom of information request and found that only 16 of the 33 services that responded had a Bridging Service in place and most of these were providing re-ablement rather than domiciliary care. We now want to encourage the roll out of more Bridging Services from NHS Trusts across the UK to ease the strain on hospital bed capacity.”
