Transforming Care Through Collaboration: Urgent Community Response Teams

The Urgent Community Response Teams (UCRT) services are part of the Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative (MSECC), a groundbreaking healthcare collaboration that is transforming services by working together. Prior to the collaborative, there were four separate UCRT services across Mid and South Essex (MSE) provided by three community organisations; the Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT), North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT) and Provide Community.

A referral to the UCRT is an alternative to a hospital visit or stay, improving patient care by enabling people to receive treatment in their own homes with improved quality of care. This also helps to reduce the risk of infections and deconditioning within hospitals, reducing the pressure on services and teams in hospitals and avoiding further deterioration by treating people at home.

The UCRT service is available seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, with patients contacted or visited within two hours of a referral.

Since the service began in 2020, referrals to UCRT have increased by 87%, helping to avoid acute admissions, reducing demand elsewhere in the system. For every UCRT referral, 7.2 acute bed days are saved on average, with an estimated cost avoidance of £308 per bed day.

Kath Evans, Deputy Director of Urgent Community Response for the Ageing Well Programme as part of the NHS Long Term Plan in NHS England and NHS Improvement described MSECC as “a leading example of successful collaboration, providing valuable insights into how UCR providers can more effectively manage demand and capacity and demonstrating how place-based services can be scaled up across a broader health system to deliver a consistent level of care.”