This article was written by Medilink Midlands Patron, the West Midlands Academic Health Science Network (WMAHSN).
Delivering high quality and frailty-attuned acute assessment and ongoing care outside congested acute hospitals is a very high priority for the NHS. The pandemic demonstrated that hospital-based acute assessment capacity can be rapidly saturated leading to delays in assessment and treatment at Emergency Departments and on Acute Medical Units. Prolonged hospital admission can have a deleterious effect on the function of older patients with frailty and where alternatives to hospital bed based care exist, they should be used to maximise outcome.
The need to deliver acute multidisciplinary assessment and medical treatments in community settings was increasingly recognised during the initial phase of the pandemic. Often patients are conveyed to hospital for diagnostic purposes to exclude low probability but high-risk conditions. Once these are excluded, the treatment is often one which could be delivered in a community setting.
We would like to connect the West Midlands with Industry to learn more about the use of point of care diagnostics embedded within a broad acute medical treatment programme designed for community based delivery. We would like to explore remote blood testing equipment, ultrasound scanning equipment and anything else that could aid the patient’s pathway to prevent a conveyance to hospital where appropriate.
In particular we need industry to demonstrate the benefits to the healthcare system which includes cost benefits, workforce efficiencies and safety data in order to plan for business cases and procurement for future service redesigns.