Emergency Care Services

Making our organisation a great place to work, and a great place to receive care, is a priority on our Getting to Good improvement journey.

One of our key aims is to provide the best emergency care possible for the communities we serve, which is the ambition of our Emergency Care Transformation Programme. Similar to the approach of the Maternity Transformation Programme, its aim is to drive forward improvements in our emergency care services to benefit both patients and colleagues. There are five programme workstreams:

• Workstream 1. Clinical Quality, Outcomes and Co-ordination of Care. This includes elements such as initial assessment, analgesia and quality of care

• Workstream 2. Staff Culture, Resilience and Health and Wellbeing. This includes behaviours, culture and development

• Workstream 3. Governance, Risk and Safety. This covers departmental risk management as well as internal professional standards

• Workstream 4. Communications and Engaging Communities. Focusing on internal and external communications for communities and staff

• Workstream 5. Environment, Pathways and Flow. Achieve and improve flow across all of our wards and therefore, ED.

The three-year programme, which is in its very early stages, has an action plan at the core, which contains a total of 117 actions to deliver. To date 15 (12.8%) are delivered, but not yet evidenced.

This month, there has been a focus on the ED discharge processes and ensuring that our patients are coded in a timely manner and safely discharged from ED. We are already starting to see improvements in this area, thank you to our clinical colleagues involved.

There has also been a focus on engaging with colleagues and encouraging them to share their ideas for improvement. The ImproveWell app has been launched for colleagues working within Emergency Care – with more than 40 colleagues already signed up. The app enables colleagues to share their ideas on what we are doing well and what we can do to make things better for those working, and accessing care, in our Emergency Departments.

The ImproveWell app has already been successfully rolled out in our Maternity Services. The platform drives engagement and can be used to upload improvement ideas, vote in polls and even share how work is going that day.

Sara Biffen, Acting Chief Operating Officer, said: “ImproveWell has a really important part to play on our improvement journey as it enables those who actually work in the departments to share their ideas and shape what we do going forward.

“We have already seen the app successfully enabling colleagues in maternity services to share their ideas for improvement and this is helping to make a real difference for our families, and our maternity colleagues. I really encourage colleagues in Emergency Care to sign up and have their say in how we can move forward effectively together.”