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

The Experience at Invergordon

The community hospitals are at different stages in implementing the morning huddle. Invergordon Community Hospital is a 28-bedded hospital that has recently introduced it and is already seeing improvements, as Senior Charge Nurse, Julie Ransome explained:

"Before this we were finding that patient discharge dates could slip, sometimes by weeks, because of a lack of communication and coordinated whole team approach. Now, we have a short, focused meeting where we talk about which patients are being discharged and when. We look at any discharge delays and discuss what we can do to move the process forward. Staff take the initiative in making calls and in setting things in place to facilitate earlier discharge. We are also more proactive in pulling patients out of Raigmore so we can free up beds there and speed their return to the community. Bed management is not an exact science, things change all the time, but we are communicating better now with our colleagues in the acute hospital and we let them know when beds become available."

Lead Allied Health Professional, Amanda Trafford added:

"Each of our Community Teams now receives an automatically generated daily report which notifies them of people from their local area who have been admitted to hospital in the last 24 hours. Some of these people will already be known to the health and social care teams but they may not be aware that the person has been admitted to hospital. This report prompts the teams to make contact with the hospital ward, share relevant information and initiate the conversation about early discharge planning. We have developed a standard operating procedure for this work and it is referred to as Community Pull."

"We weren't prescriptive about what they had to do, instead we asked them to identify what might help them to improve discharge planning and invited them to make pledges."

Mark Smith,
Associate South and Mid Operational Unit