Medway aims for brilliant!

Over the last few years at Medway we’ve made significant progress in improving the care that we provide to our patients.

We know we still have more to do to ensure the people of Medway and Swale get the care that they want and deserve and to make sure that we keep up the momentum of improvement at the Trust; that’s why we have launched our Better, Best, Brilliant improvement programme.

‘Better, Best, Brilliant’ is about putting patient care at the heart of everything we do, ensuring you receive brilliant care, from highly trained staff, in the right place and at the right time.

It’s about the hospital as a whole moving from being better, to best and on to being genuinely brilliant in the way we care for our patients.

Among the things we are working on are:

1. Ensuring you spend less time waiting in our Emergency Department
2. Using the latest technology to reduce unnecessary paperwork, freeing up doctors and nurses to spend more time caring for you
3. Working with our healthcare partners so you get the right care in the community when you are ready to leave hospital
4. Continuing to build our workforce so that you receive brilliant care from highly trained staff.

Go with the flow!

One of the key focuses of our Better, Best, Brilliant improvement programme is on improving patient flow throughout the hospital.

Flow is an extremely important issue for any hospital, and ensuring that there are enough bed spaces to enable patients to move through the hospital from admission to discharge in a timely manner, is an ongoing challenge.

The aim that 95 per cent of patients attending the Emergency Department should be admitted, discharged or transferred within four hours is one of the highest profile NHS targets and this target is impacted significantly by poor flow.

Simply put, if there are not enough bed spaces in the hospital, patients cannot be transferred to a ward from our ED, meaning they have to wait longer in the department than we would like; this isn’t good for our patients or for our ability to treat patients in a timely manner.

This why we have been looking at all aspects of patient care from the moment our patients enter ED to the moment they are discharged.

Thanks to the hard work of staff and some key changes to the way we care for patients we have made big improvements to our A&E performance in recent months. These are some of the changes that we’ve made:

1. We have incorporated a front-door streaming model which ensures patients receive treatment in the appropriate setting; an increasing number of patients are treated by GPs for more minor conditions.
2. We’ve opened medical and surgical assessment areas to reduce crowding in ED.
3. Lister Ward has been opened as a 24-hour unit to increase flow in the evening.
4. We’ve increased the use, resourcing and opening hours of the discharge lounge so that it becomes the default option for patient discharges. This means that beds on wards can be made available earlier in the day, helping flow throughout the organisation.
5. We’ve increased the number of patients who can be cared for in the surgical assessment unit, creating a new ‘short stay’ acute surgery ward and ring-fencing elective orthopaedic surgery beds to ensure that patients with planned surgery continue to be treated even in very busy periods. This has meant increased capacity in the system helping patients who need urgent surgical care to move through our ED more quickly, get treated and get home sooner.