Medway NHS Foundation Trust Celebrates First Anniversary of its Care Co-ordination Centre and Electronic Bed & Capacity Management System with TeleTracking

10th October 2024: Medway NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) today marks the 1-year anniversary of the go-live of its Care Co-ordination Centre and electronic Bed & Capacity Management (eBCM) system from TeleTracking UK. On 10th October 2023, following a rapid 22-week implementation, which included fundamental changes to operating procedures, TeleTracking and MFT delivered the Trust’s centralised, holistic approach for bed management and patient flow, giving a dedicated team of nursing professionals and bed placement specialists real-time visibility of bed status across all departments and wards within Medway Maritime Hospital. In the year since go-live, supported by this real-time operational visibility, MFT has increased care access, care delivery and is managing patient flow more efficiently and effectively, supporting the delivery of outstanding patient care.

Major milestones MFT has achieved within the first year of its Care Co-ordination Centre being operable include:

• A £1.2 million return on investment based on existing performance gains six months after go-live.
• No cessation of elective procedures due to capacity constraints in Winter ‘23/’24, and an achievement of the ERF delivery target of 119%.
• 50% reduction in patient wait time (from ED to a released bed) from 4 hours to 2 hours.
• Bed status: 60% advanced visibility of planned discharges – a figure that continues to improve week on week (Ref: Figure 1).
• Bed availability: The time from the moment a patient leaves a bed until it is available for the next patient has improved to an average 68 minutes from 150 minutes.
• 50 hours of additional nursing time has been released back into delivering care every single day through the use of a dedicated bed cleaning team.
• Improved time of discharge, with 13% of discharges now occurring before 10am. Overall the discharge time is 2 ½ hours earlier every day, with the average confirmed discharge time of 2:50 pm, providing a massive benefit to patients waiting in ED for a bed.
• Reallocation of MFT’s discharge lounge from an escalation space to its designed purpose, releasing 200 additional hours daily, with clear implications for reducing ED pressure and increasing non-elective capacity.

Nick Sinclair, Chief Operating Officer, Medway NHS Foundation Trust, comments: “With the real-time visibility of available beds, it has completely transformed how our clinical site managers operate. We have segregation between the management of beds and overall clinical site management, which means we can manage patient movement more effectively throughout the entire hospital, ensuring patients are provided with the right care, in the right place, at the right time. In addition, we are now far better able to balance anticipated demand with availability in order to maximise capacity and achieve operational excellence.

“The benefits that an Operational Platform and electronic bed management software provides extend to both patients and staff across the entire hospital – from improved bed turnaround time; reduced ED waiting times and length of stay and improved bed capacity.  Not only does this new way of working help to reduce waiting times, but it also means clinical staff have more time to care and spend with patients.”

In addition to providing real-time visibility of its beds, TeleTracking’s platform is allowing Medway’s Care Co-ordination Centre staff and executives to analyse operations, use predictive models to anticipate downstream demand, co-ordinate patient placement, sensor-track resources, and patients, and adjust resources to changing circumstances in real-time.

Looking ahead, the next phase of the project is for MFT to expand TeleTracking and its Care Co-ordination Centre into the community, so that community capacity is visible in one single place, further improving patient flow across Kent and Medway ICS.

“The events of the last few years have really shown us how much value front line staff and patients can get from having a centralised, real-time view of the bed estate, says Neil Griffiths, Managing Director, TeleTracking UK. “Traditional bed management processes are debilitating; frontline staff simply spend too much of their time chasing beds. Medway’s choice to implement a Care Co-ordination Centre, underpinned by robust operational and electronic bed management software, represents an integrated and sophisticated approach to operational excellence and capacity management – and the results the team has achieved in just 12 months speak volumes.”

Commenting on the partnership with TeleTracking, Nick Sinclair concludes: “A key message for other NHS organisations is that big projects don’t have to take years. It took MFT just 22 weeks from contract signing with TeleTracking to going live, including the fundamental change to operating procedures. The relationship has been key to ensuring not only the technology works but also that people are engaged and processes designed for purpose. Partnership is absolutely critical for what we do in operations – we can’t do it all ourselves, we need experts, not providers that give you a product and leave you to get on with it.”

About TeleTracking Technologies

TeleTracking is an integrated healthcare Operations Platform that is Expanding the Capacity to Care™ by combining comprehensive technology solutions with clinical expertise to improve care access, care delivery and care transitions. TeleTracking operational and bed management solutions and services help streamline care delivery and reduce delays, supporting staff with workflows and providing real-time visibility within and across a Trust or integrated system. TeleTracking is recognised as the market leader in Care Co-ordination Centres with more than one hundred Centres across the United States and United Kingdom.

www.teletracking.com/uk

Ref: Figure 1