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Reset week: Why not home? Why not today?

May 11, 2022

We’re officially half way through Reset Week, thank you to everyone who has been involved in managing and supporting all of the discharge activity. We know demand is still high across the organisation and its still proving a challenging endeavour, but the wellbeing of patients and our ability to continue providing safe and effective care remains paramount.

We continue to see increased numbers of patients in our Medicine Same Day Emergency Care departments which has been helping to ease the pressures on our ED departments. In addition to supporting our ED department, seeing patients in our SDECs supports better patient care and patient experience by reducing their length of stay and in most cases allowing the patients to return to their usual place of residence on the same day.

Today is a perfect opportunity to remind colleagues that they’re not on their own when it comes to supporting discharges, remember to make good use of the Integrated Discharge Hub and the Discharge to Assess process to get expert advice, support and guidance to help progress packages of care for your patients so that they can rest assured that once they are discharged, they still have ongoing care and support through community services and social care.

If you’re not up to speed, Discharge to Assess is a new model of care for all adult inpatients, and as part of that the language we use to describe discharge plans has been simplified and is nationally recognised.

Unity has been updated to reflect the changes to discharge pathways used as part of the Discharge to Assess (D2A) process.

The change means that inpatient teams need to:

  • Be clear on the meaning of each pathway
  • Select the appropriate pathways (0, 1, 2, 3 or 4) when setting TDDs for all inpatients (there is a short definition on each drop down to help)
  • Use a ‘home first’ approach – being clear that home should be the default destination for a person, before pathways 2 or 3 are selected
  • Continue to flag people as ‘Clinically Fit for Discharge’ at the appropriate time

Please see the D2A Unity change poster for further details including screenshots of the change in question.

This is a significant step forwards in using our systems to help us proactively manage and arrange discharge plans for people in our care.

For any queries, please contact the Integrated Discharge Hub on ext. 3147 or via integrated.discharge-hub@nhs.net (open 8am – 8pm, 7 days per week).