Urgent and emergency care is services which are delivering care in the right place at the right time for residents.
Our vision for urgent and emergency care is services which are delivering the right care, in the right place, at the right time for all of our population.
Much of our local strategy will support national urgent and emergency care policies and guidance, including these aims:
- To provide better support for people to self-care.
- To help people with urgent care needs to get the right advice in the right place, first time.
- To provide highly responsive urgent care services outside of the hospital so people no longer choose to attend A&E unless in an emergency.
- To ensure people with more serious or life-threatening emergency care needs receive treatment in centres with the right facilities and expertise in order to maximise chances of survival and a good recovery.
Urgent Community Response Team (UCRT)
UCRT is the new collective name for the community teams who respond to the crisis needs of patients in their own homes, including nursing and residential care homes, to avoid admission to hospital or in need of new 24-hour care. UCRT can be accessed immediately. You may already know the service by a different name, depending on your location:
- SPOR in Basildon and Brentwood
- ESDAAR in mid Essex
- RRAS in Thurrock
- SWIFT in Southend, Castle Point and Rochford
The same teams are still behind the service, but they have now come together under a single name.
The Urgent Community Response Team is part of the Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative, a partnership between Provide CIC, North East London NHS Foundation Trust and Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust. It is a community team that will help patients stay at home when they are feeling unwell, rather than be transferred to hospital. The UCRT service is designed with a ‘home first’ ethos and will provide specialist, nurse-led care in people’s own homes
The team will support patients to feel better by visiting at home to provide the necessary assessments, medication and nursing interventions and aim to stabilise patients within five days.
All calls are answered by a senior triage nurse in the Single Point of Access, who will assess the case and advise if the service is able to stabilise and manage the patient, or whether they do need hospital-based care. A member of the team will then visit the patient within two hours.
If at any point the patient deteriorates and can no longer be safely managed at home, the UCRT team will coordinate safe transfer to the hospital for an inpatient admission.