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12th January 2018
Your Healthcare’s therapists and nurses are joining forces within Kingston Hospital to help get people out of hospital and back home faster.
Our occupational therapists, dementia specialists, rapid response team and a newly developed discharge pathway are all paving the way to reduce people’s stay in hospital.
Coupled with our red bag initiative, where individuals living at care homes take their red bag with all their details into hospital with them, we are doing everything we can to speed up the process of getting people back home.
Diane Chalmers, Service Lead for Frontline Services, said: “We have many initiatives this year to get people out of hospital and back into their homes as quickly and safely as possible. Nobody wants to be in hospital any longer than necessary and our therapists and nurses help to assess people promptly and provide specialist advice. This in turn helps to improve the discharge procedure back into the community.”
Ways in which we help people get back to their familiar environment are:
Our occupational therapists support Kingston Hospital daily within the frailty team in the acute assessment unit (AAU) and in the emergency department. They assess any frail patients and provide advice to support each individual’s journey back home reducing any unnecessary prolonged hospital stay.
Our rapid response team, an experienced group of nurses with advanced clinical skills visit and treat people at home to help avoid an A&E attendance or hospital admission.
Dementia nurse specialists are often the first point of contact for people with dementia who are acutely unwell. The team help to prevent hospital admission, facilitate early discharges from hospital and coordinate moves back home. They visit people after discharge and continue to make regular visits until their condition has improved.
Individuals using the red bag initiative are visited in hospital by our Impact team who make sure that everything is ready for them when they leave hospital.
Our Better at Home occupational therapists work within a multi-disciplinary team, based in AAU, A&E and on the wards. They screen people once medically fit, provide referrals to our rehabilitation unit at Tolworth Hospital or will complete a comprehensive assessment in patients’ homes to make sure they receive all the support they need to help them remain at home.
Specialist learning disability nurses offer liaison to ensure that people with learning disabilities have their specific needs met when accessing hospital services, provide advice to prevent admission and reduce length of stay by supporting discharge.
Within Your Healthcare itself, we have streamlined the discharge pathway so all discharges come to one place, our Single Point of Access, reducing the number of referrals and additional assessments. The pathway will ensure a more responsive service for hospital discharges reducing the time from discharge to getting a person back into their familiar community.