Developing a Schedule for Unscheduled Care

"The NHS is a complex system, we have expert staff across all elements of our services, but it can be confusing for patients to know where best to go. Our offering to patients is old fashioned, we have only two streams; unscheduled and scheduled; life isn't quite like that, sometimes you need something in between.

As an NHS organisation working with innovation partners we want to develop a way of patients interacting via technology to receive; manage and give information. This will support them to make decisions about their care and in particular self determined access to services. At a pathway of care level we will be focussing on patients with low risk chest pain; Heart Failure and urgent maternity pathways. We want to allow the patient to have more control of their own care bringing together emergency waiting time information; self care pathways; their own clinical information and upcoming appointments in to one single application on a smart device.

We want to ensure that patients can communicate easily with the Trust when they want to; when they need and when they have to, we will proved patients a portal to do this in a simple way. We are in a place where access at suitable times is required by our patients. Digitally enabled access will allow 24/7 access to information and deliver the ability for patients to add required information to their care record at a time of day that suits them.

This will transform the way we deliver the Emergency and urgent care pathways for particular groups of patients to start with but can be scaled across many pathways and services allowing same day access in a planned way to urgent care. This in turn will reduce the pressure on A&E and reduce the number of outpatient attendances required or wasted due to patients not attending."