Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and Central London Community Healthcare Trust, London’s largest community services provider, are working in partnership together with GE Healthcare Performance Solutions, to improve the flow of patients through the hospital and in the community setting through an innovative ten month programme to help give patients the best care possible, at the right time, and ultimately back to the comfort of their homes as soon as clinically appropriate.
The programme will provide the Central London Community Healthcare Trust with better visibility of their upcoming referrals from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, making it possible for them to deploy their resources proactively to best meet demand.
GE Healthcare Performance Solutions will use sophisticated modelling and simulation techniques to identify front-line process efficiencies. In addition, GE Healthcare’s AgileTrac* workflow and bed management software will provide real-time visibility of patients and flow across the two organisations.
Speaking at the launch event, David Radbourne, Chief Operating Officer of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital said: “Our patients already have access to the quickest response times for emergency care in England with over 98% of patients seen and treated within four hours. Our inpatient services are also recognised as being of a very high standard and we are one of the top five hospitals in the country for better than expected mortality rates.
“But we want to continue to improve the care and experience we provide so I am delighted to be working in partnership with GE Healthcare and local health and social care partners to take a systematic approach to improve the way we manage care for patients who are kept in hospital.
“We see many opportunities with this project, in particular looking at reducing avoidable inpatient admissions from A&E, preventing unnecessary delays in leaving hospital, and ultimately making better use of our existing hospital resources. Any savings made will be reinvested into care at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.”
This is the first programme of its type led by GE Healthcare in the UK. A similar project at St Luke’s Episcopal Health System in Houston, US, has generated approximately $10 million per year savings to date and reduced average length of stay by 0.4 days.
Mark Ebbens, GE Healthcare Principal for Operational Excellence and Capacity Management said, “We’re helping our partners strive for what we call ‘boundaryless patient flow’, where we think about the patient journey beyond just the four walls of a hospital, and identify ways the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and Central London Community Healthcare Trust can work more efficiently together for the benefit of the patient.”
Richard Milner, Deputy CEO of the Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust, commented that “Both Chelsea and Westminster and Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust already had individual programmes of work in place to look at matching capacity with demand, but we had not joined ourselves up. Where GE can add great value is in joining organisations together and helping them operate at pace.”
Chelsea and Westminster is a high performing acute hospital trust which was recently rated as the safest hospital in England by the Dr Foster Hospital Guide. The Trust treats more than 360,000 patients each year.
The Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust provides healthcare in the boroughs of Barnet, Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster. The Trust employs more than 3000 health professionals and support staff to provide community services, including: adult community nursing services, children and family services, specialist services to help manage long term conditions, rehabilitation and therapies, palliative care services, offender health services and NHS walk-in and urgent care centres to almost one million people across London.
