LUHFT Life - April 2022

Your ‘Ideas into Innovation’

Last year we launched an Ideas into Innovation programme to identify ideas, nurture projects and enable investment in innovation and continuous improvement.

Teams submitted ideas which would significantly improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, improve efficiency, and positively impact patient or staff experience. Six ideas have been shortlisted to take forward including:

Block room for orthopaedic cases

IDEA: Setting up a Regional Anaesthesia (RA) block room with an ultrasound machine at Broadgreen for orthopaedic cases will allow us to reconfigure where and how nerve blocks take place for surgery, enhancing our efficiency and effectiveness.

BENEFITS:

• Better patient satisfaction compared to general anaesthesia

• Decreases recovery time

• Decreases pain scores

• Decreases postoperative nausea and vomiting for patients

• Decrease the length of a patient’s stay and increase the likelihood of day case discharge

• One extra case per theatre list due to increased efficacy.

Cancer Pathway Management Solution

IDEA: Creating an IT dashboard cancer pathway management solution, to enable a single point of access to track cancer patients' pathways, alleviating bottlenecks.

BENEFITS:

• Reduce patient waiting times to diagnosis and treatment, and alert to potential delays

• Improved transparent communication of pathways/ progression

• Reduced admin time

• Dynamic demand and capacity planning

• Improves data quality and clinical information capture.

Meeting patients’ needs - Reablement Assistants

IDEA: Develop a reablement assistant role to prevent 'deconditioning' of inpatients. Reablement is described as ‘helping people to do for themselves rather than doing it to or for them’. The funding would be utilised for project support and a Band 6 nurse and therapist who would develop a training programme.

BENEFITS:

• Prevents patient deconditioning

• Increases patient functional capacity in all organ systems

• Decreased patient risk of healthcare acquired infections, falls and pressure ulcers

• Reduced length of stay and improve the chance of returning to their own home

• Improved patient flow.

Cognitive Assessment and Recovery Enablement Centre (The CARE Centre)

IDEA: Create a day centre providing enhanced support and therapies for older inpatients with cognitive impairment. The centre would focus on supporting quicker recovery and enabling earlier discharge from hospital.

BENEFITS:

• Provides enhanced clinical patient care from staff with specific training relating to dementia and delirium

• Ward staff would have to deal with less violence, aggression and challenging behaviour

• Reduced need for 1-1 and special observation care

• Reduced length of stay and costs associated with hospital acquired harm.

Orthopaedic Nursing Support

IDEA: Reconfiguring Ward 1 to create an admission area for femoral fracture patients and increasing staffing numbers with one Band 7 and one Band 6 to enable dedicated nurse leadership and a mechanism to proactively to pull patients from AED.

BENEFITS:

• Reduced time it takes for hip fracture patients to be seen by orthopaedic specialists

• Reduced length of stay, time to surgery and mortality

• Improved patient flow and efficiency

• Improved patient outcomes

• Patients placed in a speciality bed in a more timely manner improving patient experience

• Strong nursing leadership with a dedicated focus on the #NOF patient pathways

• Enhanced care and reduced harm to patients.

Robotic Process Automation for Outpatient administrative functions

IDEA: Investing in five robots to undertake administrative processes to release staff to carry out other essential work within the OPD administrative function.

BENEFITS:

• Robotic Process Automation will undertake very basic computer tasks

• Staff can focus on complex activities and patientfacing roles

• Patient calls answered more quickly

• Patient outcomes completed more efficiently

• The OPD service will become more efficient.