Doing our bit to reduce unnecessary hospital admissions
A new model for maximising alternative care pathways in the hope of avoiding unnecessary ambulance attendances and hospital admissions has now been successfully rolled out across the North East.
Throughout 2023, we worked with partners throughout the region to improve access for NEAS clinicians into urgent community response (UCR) services and to allow UCR clinicians to refer patients to their service directly from the NEAS triage system.
Having initially trialled the partnership in North Tees, the majority of UCR services are now live.
Kerry McQuade, director of strategy, planning and transformation at NEAS, said: “We are committed to collaborating and innovating with our partners to provide the most responsive, effective care for our patients, and this programme is a great example of that.
“Our ambulance crews already had a strong track record of referring into UCR services, and that has continued over the last year.
“This additional programme seeks to refer those patients without the need for an ambulance attendance, ensuring our patients receive the care they need quickly whilst reserving ambulances for patients who need them.
“The programme involves a ‘push and pull’ model, with NEAS clinicians pushing to UCR services and UCR clinicians in-turn pulling from our triage system. This is on top of the referrals made by our ambulance crews which have continued to increase over the last year.
“It has taken a great deal of effort from all sides to get to where we are, with a number of variations across each UCR service, combined with technological requirements, presenting us with several challenges along the way. However, I’m incredibly proud of what we have achieved together and I’m looking forward to seeing what this continued partnership will achieve in 2024.”