What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme of 'How can improvement be used to reduce delays accessing health and care services'?

We hope to enhance menu of support options available via Home Coming project by delivering the right care at the right time and at a place of the individuals choice, which in result will support early prevention and intervention.

We are proposing a fast-track alternative to professional services that might only be required for a short period of time to support safe discharge and prevent readmission.

Additionally, the designed service could be used to review clients on the unmet need list and for them potentially to be offered a service via this proposed digital support hub.

With the establishment of a national care service the need to focus on allowing service users to have more choice and control, as well as fully participating in society, and living an ordinary life which is preserved by dignity and freedom of choice.

What does your project aim to achieve?

The proposal would enable us to explore the following aspects:

Supporting discharge to assess processes in place.
Provide welfare/safety checks.
Support medication prompting
Provide monitoring of life parameters
Detect falls.
Safeguard people with memory loss through GPS location and an option of geofencing
Support hydration and nutrition
Provide option of face-to-face carer visit (if required)
To allow a significant percentage of our workforce to work virtually building on their previous 2 years of experience

Some of the options above are currently available to people that have a social care package in place, however, for this to be in place at the outset, the individual must be assessed by care management and normally they are placed on a waiting list causing huge impact within the system here in Aberdeen, resulting in huge levels of unmet need going into thousands of hours required to address the backlog

How will the project be delivered?

The proposal would be delivered in partnership with Scottish Care, ACVO, Aberdeen City Health and Social Care Partnership, Specialist Resource Solutions. We aim to link alternative option to traditional face to face care delivery to Hospital home coming project, assisting patients who may require additional support at home post-discharge

The idea supports preventative and enabling approaches through innovative solutions including technology, cross sector system wide approach, including signposting and linking with community-based services, voluntary, statutory and independent sectors.

Example of use:
Currently all medication ‘calls’ in Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire are delivered in F2F model. There is an opportunity to test delivery of prompting of medication ‘calls’ via existing secure software (Near Me, Consult Now and to enable Digital Support Hub functionality)

This will significantly reduce the foot fall in clients’ homes and increase the capacity of the workforce to support clients with more complex needs.

How is your project going to share learning?

Outcome Measure:
·      uptake of clients using Digital support hub
·      number of successful discharges
·      Cost savings
·      Number of staff working offers a home working/flexible opportunity vs working with service users face-to-face

Process Measures:
Onboarding time
Number of failures
Number of staff trained & able to trouble shoot
Staff satisfaction
Service User / Client satisfaction

Balancing Measures (unintended consequences):
Service User / Client experience – care journey
Number of service users / clients who have gone on to connect in with community based activities (digitally)
Number of service users / clients where the digital experience & support through this has enable Near Me use to support rehab & preventative activities.

We aim to share our learning in the final project report.

Additionally we have secured a dedicated research resource to support the project and share the knowledge nationally.