Daily Dynamic Approach in the community: Highland improvement story part one

Daily Dynamic Discharge

The Highland Health and Social Care Partnership decided to implement the Daily Dynamic Discharge model across its community hospitals. Kate said:

"Most of the focus on patient flow improvement takes place in the acute setting, so community hospitals are often excluded. We believed that we could improve the efficiency of patient discharge from community hospitals by becoming more proactive in identifying suitable patients at an earlier stage. In NHS Highland, we have pioneered an approach to continuous improvement called The Highland Quality Approach, based on lean methodologies. It places the person that we are caring for firmly at the centre of everything we do and has three main aims: 1. To reduce harm 2. To reduce variation and 3. To manage variation."

"The principles of Daily Dynamic Discharge fitted in well with The Highland Quality Approach and provided a framework for us to improve proactive discharge planning in a community setting. We recognised that we needed to be more dynamic and move towards a seven-day approach to transferring and discharging patients. We were also keen to be much more proactive in pulling patients from the main hospital, ideally back to their own home but often back to their local community hospital as they required ongoing sub-acute hospital care. The Daily Dynamic Discharge toolkit has been part of a suite of different approaches which have supported us to do this. To date, it has been really helpful in establishing a standard approach to running our local huddles in each of our Community Hospitals."