By Samantha Goldberg, Urgent Emergency Care System Director
One of our top priorities as an integrated health and care system is to manage patients’ needs for urgent and emergency care as quickly and safely as possible. We want to ensure that you and your loved ones receive the right care, in the right place, at the right time.
All health and care partners, such as our hospital, community, and providers of mental health care work closely to coordinate our system’s resources, efforts, and energy to achieve this aim. This collaboration intensifies during winter when colder weather and seasonal illnesses like the flu increase the demand for NHS services.
In this blog, I want to give you an overview of some of the work that is taking place behind the scenes to support local urgent and emergency health and care needs and help reduce pressure on our local hospitals.
We now have a single point of contact that our ambulance teams at East of England Ambulance Service (EEAST) can use to reach multiple services through one route. With a single phone call, ambulance crews can determine the best care pathway for a patient with non-life-threatening symptoms. They can review the patient’s medication requirements and ensure they receive the right care from the comfort of their home, or into other forms of urgent care or community care, without needing to visit the hospital.
Behind the scenes of the single point of contact, a multi-disciplinary team of clinicians help to assess whether patients with more immediate care needs, who are well enough to be cared for at home, can be supported by services such as Virtual Wards (also known as hospital at home) or the Urgent Community Response Team,known as the ‘UCRT’. The UCRT provides out-of-hospital specialist care to those in urgent need, mobilising rapid care for patients experiencing an acute episode of illness or social care crisis helping to keep people in their own homes where they are more comfortable.
Since November 2023, 2,500 calls have prevented over 60% of these patients from being taken to the hospital. More recently, the number of calls increased to 562 in November 2024, with only 27% of patients requiring a hospital bed, helping free up beds for those that need them the most.
To help prepare for winter pressures, key teams across our health and care system are now co-located in one room. By being in the same room, all health and care partners can have a live bird’s eye view of healthcare services across the region, speeding up decisions on how best to support patients who are medically fit to leave hospital to get home, or transition to a community setting as soon as possible.
Working together in this joined-up way benefits both healthcare professionals and local patients. Patients can receive more direct referrals to the care they need and receive quality treatment in their own homes or in the community without the need for hospital admission.
This approach not only improves patient experience and health outcomes but helps ensure hospital beds are available for those that need them the most while easing pressure on emergency services, allowing ambulance crews to treat patients quicker so that they can get back out on the road and help other patients who require emergency care.