Why?
North Devon Healthcare NHS Trust are fully on board to digitise their patient care and identified the Fracture Clinic as a starting point. Their key objectives were to:
- Improve patient experience
- Empower the patient to manage their own treatment
- Assess the impact on length of stay
- Assess the impact on re-admission rate
- Reduce time spent with patients during an appointment
- Reduce time spent on phone calls dealing with issues and identity the types of queries people have/repetition
- Improve the Fracture dept. presence on the Trust website and point patients to it as central point for queries
- Identify the no. of people who have pressure ulcers and the cost to treat per ulcer
- Improve staff training on pressure ulcers (internal and external)
- Identify ways to inform patients about the videos (leaflets given out but quite a few patients say they never received them)
How?
An initial meeting was held with the fracture clinic to understand the patient pathway, how video could make a difference, and where the patients could be intercepted with video.
The North Devon Healthcare NHS Trust want to implement video right across the Trust and the amount of resource this would take, we agreed that as part of our ‘Academy’ offering which supports clients through training and implementation, we set up a secondment for a 3 month period for someone to be in situ to oversee the process.
Hugh Kelly, currently working at the hospital in the Organisational & Development Dept focusing on staff engagement and various projects under the Listening into Action initiative, was subsequently recruited. ‘Our initial meeting with the fracture clinic proved very positive. They really saw the benefits of using video not only for their patients, but to improve their working practices on a day to day basis. In the short time that I have been working on this project I can already see a number of ways in which we can help achieve their objectives’.
What?
The Trust are utilising the range of fracture clinic videos that Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust originally commissioned – take a look at the full series here. Ideas for deployment to get the videos seen and used by patients include:
• Add url to leaflets, patient records, appointment cards
• Show videos on waiting rooms TV screens
• Point people to the main Trust website and make this the normal ‘place to go’
Evaluation
As this project is in its early stages (started in January 2016) so we aim to track the progress of Hugh and the Trust along their journey so will be posting updates in our news section on a regular basis.
Update – 20th April 2016
We are delighted to announce that Hugh’s contract has been extended for another 2 months so that he can finish off his initial project and develop a business case to show the need to extend his time there even further.
To date Hugh has been working on the following:
Fracture Clinic
Phase 1: Complete – all 12 videos have been embedded into the out patient department. The full range can be seen here http://www.northdevonhealth.nhs.uk/fracture-clinic/videos/
Phase 2: In progress – connecting with the wider organisation and GPs to intercept patients at GP appointment stage and connect with community staff after a fracture clinic appointment.
Radiology
Phase 1: Completed – flouroscopy and ultra sound videos (working on MRI and CT). Patients get an appointment letter with links to the videos.
Says Hugh on reflection of his 3 month placement ‘Being at the heart of the Trust, assessing and moving the project along has made all of this happen in a very short space of time. Managing the production of 13 videos across 4 services takes time and the Trust, with staffing levels under pressure as it is, does not have the capacity in house. The biggest part of the business case to extend my contract was to highlight the cost benefits of using video across the trust, make evaluations and to suggest improvements that could be made, such as when information could be better prescribed‘.
Update – 13th May 2016
On submission of Hugh’s business case, the Trust have agreed and seen the worth in extending Hugh’s contract 5 days a week for a 6 month period. We are delighted to see such progress in North Devon and their utilisation of this excellent resource to fully embed video into their patient care.
