New beds created to ease winter pressure on Emergency Department
As winter has arrived, University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust (UHP) has opened new beds to help relieve the pressure on its busy Emergency Department.
By creating additional beds, patients will be able to move more easily through the hospital from the Emergency Department, in turn relieving long waits.
Rachel O’ Connor, Director of Integrated Care, Partnerships and Strategy at UHP, said: “As part of our winter plans, we are working very hard to get patients to the right place at the right time.
“More beds and more capacity to support people going home with care support creates additional flow through the hospital, relieving pressure on the Emergency Department.
“In addition, we’re working together across Health and Social Care to create capacity, and to make sure that people are only in hospital when they need to be.”
Additional beds at University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust include:
- Mount Gould Discharge Assessment Unit – 12 beds added to Mount Gould’s 52 bedded unit (in addition to the 15 beds for stroke rehabilitation at Mount Gould Hospital)
- New building with Batham Orthopaedic Ward – 24 beds
- The Chestnut Urology Investigation Unit – sees 500 patients a week
- Virtual Wards – for 50 patients
Virtual Ward patient Susan Miller, 75, from Plympton, spent 15 days as an inpatient for her heart condition. But going home with a package of care and virtual ward technology, meant her blood pressure could be monitored at home with regular contact from the Derriford team and oversight from her consultant.
She said: “When you arrive at the hospital everyone is very professional as you would hope, but there is queue of ambulances because the pressure on the emergency system is very high. I know I will be sent to the area that is most appropriate for me, but in the meantime, the reason that I am being held up for so long is because there’s a bottleneck at the other end.
“I hope that instead of there being 20 or 30 people waiting to have their blood pressure taken and their general health checked, this equipment would be available for them to go home and press a button and feel as confident as I do.”
A new building has created additional wards for Orthopaedics to bring down waiting lists for hip and knee replacement surgery, and for urology patients. By moving Urology and Orthopaedics into a new building, the vacated wards are now available for additional medical beds that patients can move to from the Emergency Department.
What else is being done?
The Trust is working together through a Devon Coordination Hub, a group of organisations working together to improve and streamline processes to provide care closer to home, and in the community where possible.
By ensuring there are more Consultants in the Emergency Department, the Trust is working to the ‘Acute Medicine Model’ meaning people can be referred and seen more quickly by Acute Medicine Consultants, and decision making about patients’ care is faster.
The new purpose built three floor REI (formerly known as the Royal Eye Infirmary) delivers enhanced ophthalmic care, bringing together outpatient and surgical eye treatments as well as an expanded service for children, has moved away from the Derriford Hospital site, relieving additional space and bed capacity on the main site.
Future developments include a new Urgent Treatment Centre, Fracture Clinic and Urgent Emergency Care Facility on the main Derriford Hospital site.
