Hello all,
This month has been all about our teams pulling together to respond to the high levels of emergency demand and winter pressures we are seeing across the NHS, more on that below, but in other news we also launched digital referrals for our Integrated Discharge Team, as well as a new patient video to support people to access the right NHS services. We also reflected on our length of stay work and celebrated another nomination for our Digital team for their work on preventing patient pressure damage for those in hospital. We have also been doing a lot of work behind the scenes preparing for financial year end and planning for 2025/26.
Our services
Winter pressures
Since the start of the year, the high levels of respiratory viruses, emergency demand and staff sickness has been felt across the country, especially amongst acute NHS providers with a number declaring Critical Incidents. SASH has been no different and despite our best efforts over the Christmas and New Year period, we began the year with a Critical Incident on the 2 January due to sustained high levels of emergency attendances, pressures on our bed capacity due to ongoing infection issues from Norovirus and flu, and a number of staff shortages. Thanks to a range of actions taken through our winter plan, working with our partners and a huge amount of hard work by our teams, we were able to stand the incident down to Business Continuity after 48 hours. While we are taking steps to learn from this incident, with over 300 Emergency Department attendances a day we are still in the most challenging part of our winter peak and the enduring operational pressures we are seeing will likely continue throughout the month ahead.
Our challenge now as a health service is to keep up the momentum as we see even greater levels of demand on our emergency pathways. That includes, ensuring the public are aware of which services to access when. To help with this, last week the Trust launched a new video, made with our partners, on the local alternatives to our Emergency Department. You can see this video on our website.
Steamlining our discharge referrals
This week the Trust launched the first phase of its new digital referrals for our Integrated Discharge Team, who manage the discharge process of our patients with complex needs. We know patients want to get home as soon as they can - being able to openly discuss discharge planning with patients and loved ones, escalating any issues early on, and engaging with external partners such as social services, is essential for making that happen – which in turn speeds up patient recovery. From this week the team have moved their patient management to Cerner, the system used across the hospital for referrals and records. This will significantly reduce the time a referral takes, making it an excellent step in our digital journey to improve patient experience and provide safer care. A quicker referral process will also ensure patients who are likely to require additional care or support following discharge are identified to the team earlier in their journey, giving them the best chance possible of getting home sooner.
Our partners
Length of stay
Over the last two years we have been focused on reducing the length of stay for our patients. This winter, we’ve seen continued improvements, with our average non-elective length of stay consistently remaining below five days — a milestone we’ve not achieved in the last two years. In fact, since 2022/23 we have sustainably reduced our average non-elective length of stay by 1–1.5 days, thanks to the hard work of our clinical and operational teams, as well as strong collaboration with our system partners. However, there is still more to do to reduce bed occupancy levels, which is critical to maintaining safe, quality care for our patients. Looking ahead, we will continue working on refining our Models of Care, embedding same-day emergency care pathways, and focusing on reducing the number of patients staying over seven days. These efforts will be supported by partnership initiatives over the coming weeks – helping to ensure we maintain our progress and continue to improve patient care, which is crucial to keeping our services safe through these periods of high demand where our Emergency Department is processing more than 300 attendances a day.
Trust news
Primrose Awards
In December, following the success of the Bluebell Awards which celebrate Nursing Assistants, and the DAISY Award which recognise Nurses and Midwives, we were pleased to launch the Primrose Award to recognise our Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) and AHP support workers who go above and beyond to provide patients and families with excellent clinical care. At SASH our AHPs play a crucial role in helping patients live their lives as fully as possible from physiotherapists to dietitians, this new monthly award will be a great way to celebrate all the brilliant work our AHPs do to provide exceptional patient care, support colleagues, and drive forward service innovation. Similar to our other award programmes, patients, families and colleagues can all nominate an AHP for the Primrose Award.
Awards
Two months after winning a national innovation award for their work on the Trust’s first Digital Care Pathway for Skin and Pressure Ulcer Prevention last year, the Trust’s digital team were also made a finalist for a Healthcare Tech Newspaper Award for the same project, which has significantly improved the process for recording patient signs of pressure damage digitally. The team were shortlisted for the Healthcare Improvement/Operations Transformation category, and amidst some tough competition. While they didn’t win this time, it’s still a brilliant achievement to have been nominated.
In more good news, the Trust’s partnership work with Acumentice on improving our performance, has also seen us land on the shortlists for two HSJ partnership awards. One for elective care recovery and another for urgent and emergency care improvement work. The winners won’t be announced until March 2025 but given the challenges the Trust felt last year around our elective care waiting lists and urgent and emergency care through periods of high demand and industrial action, these nominations are a great way to recognise all we have achieved in these areas in 2024.