Unscheduled Care Coordination Hub Celebrates One Year | News

 

The Norfolk & Waveney Unscheduled Care Coordination Hub (UCCH) has been making significant strides in getting patients the right care since its inception a year ago. Based at Reed House on the Broadland Business Park in Norwich, the UCCH is a clinical triage and patient navigation centre where clinicians from different health and care providers work together to ensure patients receive the best care in the right place.

Coordinated Care 

Staff at the hub review ambulance waiting lists for patients who need immediate attention but are not seriously ill or injured. When a patient is identified, the UCCH ensures they receive the most suitable care for their situation – which is not always ambulance care. The team also takes referrals directly from paramedics on scene and from staff in community services.

For example, after assessing a patient’s needs, the UCCH might recommend that someone who called 999 is seen by a community nurse instead of an ambulance. Or someone calling 111 might be attended by an advanced care practitioner from the ambulance trust and a community therapist.

This intervention reduces unnecessary hospital visits by arranging for appropriate care at or close to home where possible.

Preventing Unnecessary Ambulance Dispatches

When the UCCH was established a year ago, its focus was on transferring patients from ambulance waiting lists to community providers. This helped alleviate long ambulance waiting times and supported the ambulance trust by enabling them to reach patients most in need of emergent care more quickly.

In its first year, the UCCH has handled over 10,000 patients and prevented more than 7,500 unnecessary ambulance dispatches, enabling those patients to be treated at home and avoid a trip to hospital. To date, around nine in ten patients have been able to remain at home seven days after contact with the hub. Of those patients conveyed to hospital, UCCH has enabled them to be cared for directly with the specialists in Same Day Emergency Care services or in the Acute Medical Unit, preventing long waits in the busy Emergency Departments.

Simplifying Complexity in the Health and Care System

Staff at the UCCH already collaborate with numerous health and social care providers across Norfolk and Waveney. They are now working towards becoming the Norfolk and Waveney ‘Single Point of Access’.

To enable this, the hub will work even more closely with Virtual Ward, Norwich Escalation Avoidance Team (NEAT), and GP services. They are also aiming to increase support for care home patients, strengthen their support for the ambulance service, and develop closer working relationships with acute hospital trusts.

This will help both patients and healthcare professionals navigate a sometimes-complex system. When patients access healthcare through 999, 111, community, primary care, or – eventually – acute hospital emergency departments, they can be referred to UCCH to ensure they get the most suitable care for their needs.

UCCH in action

Filipe Figueiredo, the Integrated Service Lead for the UCCH, explained a typical case where the UCCH might intervene: “If a Community Nurse visits a patient for routine leg ulcer treatment and finds the patient on the floor with a potential hip injury, the standard procedure would be to pass the patient to 999. They would then be taken by ambulance to an acute hospital.

“UCCH will perform a complex telephone triage to identify the patient’s needs, then initiate the most suitable response. For that patient, we would potentially utilise an ambulance trust Advanced Clinical Practitioner, plus the Norfolk County Council Swift Response service, and the patient’s GP, combining system-wide resources to keep that person safely at home.

“This greatly increases patient satisfaction, by ensuring they can receive the right care in the most appropriate setting. It also increases satisfaction for our healthcare colleagues, who see a quicker response for their patients.”

Richard Davis, Advanced Paramedic in EEAST Clinical Assessment Service (CAS), praised the impact of UCCH on patients and the ambulance service:

"The UCCH provides timely access to patients' unscheduled care needs within a community setting.

"Importantly from a patient perspective, through collaborative working partnerships, EEAST has facilitated this without delaying care safely and effectively. The benefits of reducing potential conveyances to an acute hospital setting produces an immediate opportunity for significantly reducing ambulance waiting times in these acute settings.

"A crucial consequence is that more patient-facing staff hours (PFSH) are available to respond to community patients experiencing 'time-critical' emergencies.

"This collaborative work brings together local services enabling effective and efficient planning of a range of patients' unscheduled care needs in a setting that we know they prefer, at home. This timely planning and deliverance of community service drives an allied approach to transforming UEC landscapes placing the patient at the centre of their needs."

The UCCH's innovative approach is setting a new standard in patient care, ensuring that patients receive timely and appropriate care while reducing the strain on emergency services.