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 aim to increase daily discharges, before 12 noon.

To achieve this we will hold twice daily Multi-disciplinary board meetings.  We will discuss each patient; their PDP, ensuring that AHP’s have discharged the patient, if they require care packages to be reinstated or commenced, any transport issues and that their IDL and medications are ready for morning of discharge.

Any issues that are delaying patients discharge are identified early.

This should enable us to reduce patient’s length of stay, therefore, enabling us to increase the number of patients requiring admission for surgery and investigations.

What does your project aim to achieve?

• We aim to increase daily discharges, before 12 noon.
• We aim to reduce average length of stay in Neurology, Neurosurgery, Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery
• We aim to reduce average length of stay for specific operations, such as lumbar decompression.

How will the project be delivered?

Discharge without Delay

To achieve this we will hold twice daily multi-disciplinary board meetings. We will discuss each patient; their PDP, ensuring that AHP’s have discharged the patient, if they require care packages to be reinstated or commenced, any transport issues and that their IDL and medications are ready for morning of discharge. Any issues will be flagged at these meetings.

Length of Stay per operation

Post-holder will convene a short-life working group to examine particular operations their corresponding length of stay. They will identify particular operations where INS performs with exception to other neurosurgical centres in the UK. Working closely with interdisciplinary group they will introduce a number of measures to reduce LOS.

Project management

Regular touchpoint meetings with patient flow team to establish progress against key objectives. Access to appropriate colleagues and support from Clinical Service Manager for post-holder through difficult conversations to implement and embed change.

How is your project going to share learning?

An updated SBAR will be kept in order to track interventions and progress. On completion of schemes, a report will be formulated to assess the impact of the intervention.

Project Updates

Regular appraisal with Lead Nurse – monthly. There will be a minute of these meetings to provide back to the QI team.

CSM Meeting on new initiatives and progress update – two monthly

Quarterly QI Meeting to discuss progress against targets.