Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust expands care co-ordination centre
MTW and Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust implement the region’s first integrated care co-ordination centre, strengthening collaboration between acute and community care
Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust (MTW) is expanding its capacity to care in collaboration with Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT).
The trust and TeleTracking Technologies have announced the expansion of MTW’s patient flow platform into KCHFT’s four community hospitals.
This is one of the UK’s first examples of shared operational decision making and strategic capacity planning across a region, and a move to integrated care delivery.
On 24 November 2020, MTW went live with the first phase of its centralised, holistic approach to capacity management, implementing a care co-ordination centre powered by TeleTracking’s integrated healthcare operations platform.
The software provides real-time visibility of the bed status - occupied; pending discharge; clean status; ready to be allocated; and allocated across its two sites, Maidstone Hospital and Tunbridge Wells Hospital.
With real-time visibility of available beds, MTW has significantly improved capacity management, better supporting staff with workflows and delivering operational improvements across the 712-bed organisation.
The trust has also increased the number of elective procedures performed each day, reduced patient transfer times by 26%, and given nurses and ward staff more time back to focus on patient care.
More recently, MTW and KCHFT recognised that the ability to manage patient flow more effectively, was a model that could easily be extended into Kent’s 80 beds across its community hospitals.
“Working with our MTW colleagues we can help manage the patient journey from an acute hospital to our community hospitals, helping them to receive the right care at the right time with the ultimate goal to be able to discharge them safely back to their own homes
By adding further capacity and improving operational efficiency across the integrated health system, the trusts are able to increase the number of timely discharges and reduce patients’ length of stay.
Nick Sinclair, director of central operations at MTW, said: “The expansion of TeleTracking into our community hospitals will provide numerous benefits to patients and the broader healthcare system in Kent.
“Both MTW and Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust now work from a single source of truth across the system in real time, meaning we can enable closer collaboration and system-wide working to minimise discharge delays and reduce patients’ length of stay in the acute setting, while better supporting our staff and providing patients with a seamless transition into community care.”
In addition to providing real-time visibility of beds across the two acute and four community hospitals, the technology platform allows colleagues to analyse operations using predictive models to anticipate downstream demand, co-ordinate patient placement, and adjust resources to changing circumstances in real-time.
The vision and the commitment that all stakeholders at a system level have demonstrated is both pioneering and inspirational as the NHS strategically looks to deliver Integrated Care Systems
Clare Thomas, community services director at KCHFT, added: “Working with our MTW colleagues we can help manage the patient journey from an acute hospital to our community hospitals, helping them to receive the right care at the right time with the ultimate goal to be able to discharge them safely back to their own homes.
“This is an important step to working in a more-integrated way across the county, improving the patient experience and allowing us to help more people in our community who need our services in a timely way.”
And Neil Griffiths, managing director of TeleTracking International, said: “MTW’s care co-ordination centre already represents an integrated and sophisticated approach to operational excellence and capacity management, moving away from traditional and manual siloed point solutions. The expansion of this methodology into Kent’s community hospitals is a testament to the leadership at MTW and KCHFT and the power of operational solutions to unlock capacity and improve patient flow across an entire health system.
“The vision and the commitment that all stakeholders at a system level have demonstrated is both pioneering and inspirational as the NHS strategically looks to deliver Integrated Care Systems.”