Healthcare professionals in the NHS are facing increasingly complex work environments driven by rising resource demands, capacity issues and staff shortages. At the same time, leaders are navigating pressures to speed response times and leverage new technologies.
As operations grow more complex, quickened response times can cause gridlock across emergency departments as diminished teams struggle to manage overstretched workloads.
To help address these challenges, professionals are adopting novel organisational practices and tech-focused solutions. Here’s how hospitals are balancing faster emergency response times with increasing operational complexity to improve outcomes for patients and NHS staff.
Expanded out-of-hospital care operations
With reports revealing ≈35% of patients wait more than 4 hours to be seen in A&E, many hospitals are expanding out-of-hospital care operations. Through services like NHS Urgent Community Response (UCR), healthcare professionals can provide hospital-level care in patients’ homes to help reduce hospital admissions and lessen the strains on on-site staff.
By providing in-home assessments for referrals like uninjured falls, mobility loss and the worsening of existing long-term conditions, healthcare professionals can both alleviate the pressures faced by in-hospital teams and speed response times, with data revealing 83% of UCR patients are seen within 2 hours of referral, exceeding the national expectation of 70%.
Intelligent healthcare security technologies
Smart healthcare security solutions like access control, video security and communications technologies are being utilised by healthcare professionals to help streamline admissions, quicken threat responses and improve facility-wide security awareness. By integrating these technologies, leaders can develop efficiency-boosting and outcome-enhancing automations.
Touchless access systems provide staff streamlined, hygienic access to role-relevant areas at all times and can be merged with visitor management solutions to help speed admissions. Integrations between AI-powered cameras, sensors and communications systems can help ensure staff are informed of threats like acts of violence to help guide appropriate responses.
Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) pathways
To maintain an efficient equilibrium in modern hospitals, leaders are exploring ways to speed turnaround times without impacting quality of care. An effective example of this can be seen in the increasing optimisation of SDEC pathways that help professionals provide treatment to patients with urgent conditions within a more concise timeframe to minimise overnight stays.
To date, the implementation of SDEC has helped over 200,000 patients receive same-day diagnosis and treatment without requiring overnight observation. By minimising the number of beds in use where possible, particularly during peak hours and surge periods, leaders can help ensure quickened emergency response times don’t introduce congestion across wards.
Accelerated hospital discharge processes
Alongside the optimisation of SDEC pathways, many hospital leaders are exploring joint care transfer initiatives with local authorities to help free up beds for incoming emergencies. Via these initiatives, health, social care, housing and voluntary services are merged in a shared space to provide a hub for patients to receive tailored care and support for at-home recovery.
The main goal of these ‘transfer of care hubs’ is to minimise unnecessary hospital stays and quicken discharge processes while still ensuring patients require the required care to recover out-of-hospital. By transitioning some elements of post-recovery for non-urgent conditions to external facilities and, eventually, patients’ homes, leaders can minimise bed-blocking issues.
Summary
As healthcare professionals and leadership teams continue to quicken response times and pursue process efficiency improvements, some hospitals are struggling to match efficiencies across wider aspects of daily operations, introducing novel challenges for overstretched staff.
To help alleviate workload pressures and free up resources to better-accommodate incoming emergencies, many leaders are exploring innovative organisational practices and intelligent technologies leveraged to help improve turnaround times and enhance site-wide efficiencies.
By expanding out-of-hospital care operations, bolstering SDEC pathways and accelerating hospital discharge processes, leaders can help to ensure standards of care are maintained while limited resources are freed to accommodate incoming emergencies. When paired with smart security solutions, these practices can help staff to streamline facility-wide operations.
