Action plan to cut Shropshire ambulance pressure
Health bosses have drawn up an action plan to deal with the surge in demand for ambulance services in Shropshire.
An ambulance demand and pathways group has carried out a ‘deep dive’ analysis of emergency vehicle activity to determine the nature of the increase and the key drivers for it.
A list of key actions to help deal with the demands has been drawn up and are included in a report to Shropshire's Clinical Commissioning Group's governance board, which meets on Wednesday.
One suggests increasing the uptake of minor injury units (MIU), ensuring crews understand the range of injuries the units can manage.
The report says Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust is also exploring the potential to provide A&E nurses with a live feed online to the waiting times in MIUs so patients attending A&E can make a choice of where they want to be treated.
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It says there is potential to expand this to the 111 service, however, 'technical issues are proving a barrier to delivering this development in the short term'.
Other key actions include having a community service care co-ordinator based in the ambulance control room.
They will help identify whether patients can be treated within the community, rather than be taken to A&E.
The development of the CCG's Shropshire Care Closer to Home programme is also expected to have an impact on reducing the demand on hospitals.
Handover
There are plans for a health crisis response team, and ‘step-up’ beds would mean patients had bed-based care local to where they live, possibly in community hospitals or nursing homes.
The care model also intends to bring local authority staff such as social workers and those employed by the NHS closer together.
A hospital ambulance liaison officer role also exists at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital to help with the handover of patients.
The report to the CCG board says: "Over the last 18 months, and particularly last winter, Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin have recorded higher than expected increases in ambulance demand.
"Whilst increases have been experienced across the region, our local demand increases are higher than elsewhere.
"The new commissioner led system multi-stakeholder ambulance demand and pathways group has continued to meet every two weeks and has developed a detailed action plan."
Latest figures, included in a separate report to the CCG board, shows there were delays of more than half-an-hour on 627 occasions when ambulance crews tried to hand over patients at the county's A&Es in May.
Delays of more than an hour happened on 132 occasions, however the number of delays had dropped from the previous month.
