Developing a patient-focused discourse around hospital flow

Overview

• We spent time filming with Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, learning about their TIME quality improvement programme. 
• The programme of work aims to respond to the need to go beyond referring to hospital flow and discharge delays in an impersonal manner, and instead re-frame improvement discourse around an understanding of the experience of patients. By changing the language used, the trust is seeing a change in culture internally, with patients and their experiences at the centre. This has the additional benefit of being more motivating for teams working under pressure.
• Beyond the focus on discourse, there is a strong emphasis on empowering individual wards to understand their own data and develop bespoke improvement initiatives that help to move patients in and out of the hospital more effectively. Wards are supported by trust-wide patient flow managers and ward-level patient-flow coordinators, who are a key part of each ward's multidisciplinary team. 
• The programme connects with and was featured in our Last 1,000 Days series, which is a call-to-action on the need for a better understanding of what it means for an elderly person to be in hospital towards the end of their lives, and how crucial it is to be able to safely return them to their community as soon as possible.