When you don't feel your best, there is nothing better than your own home. Being in your own space where you are comfortable can help you feel like yourself in no time. On the other hand, for people dealing with more complex issues, a hospital stay is sometimes needed to help them get onto the path to recovery. That is where our incredible team across our trust help our service users gain the skills to deal with whatever life throws them. However, when a service user stays with us, they may be far from friends and family, which can make their stay feel very detached from their support network. To help with this, we have been researching and creating our Reducing Length of Stay Quality Improvement Programme at Sussex Partnership.

 

So, where did we start? Back in May, we launched a trial version of the programme with a small group of 15 participants who we thought would benefit from the experience. We made sure we chose a range of people across each of our Services to receive intensive support in leading their quality improvement projects. Throughout the trial, we supported them by giving them weekly mentoring, action-oriented daily huddles, and discharge planning from the start or even before a user came to stay with us. We also looked into how we could improve the communication between inpatient and community-based teams and how we could make the process easier.

'How did it go?' I hear you ask. We found that across the sites which took part, it helped us better deliver our care to our users! On our Regency ward based at Mill View Hospital, the number of patients the team huddles identified increased from 6 to 20 over the course of a month, which meant that we could focus more on them and deliver planning and care which was better suited for their needs. Following on from this, in our Mid Sussex Assessment and Treatment Service, relevant ward rounds attended by our lead practitioners increased from 25% to 80% over a couple of weeks. As a result of this, our users at the site befitted from improved communication and discharge planning from staff. With the trial's success, we are looking to see how we can scale up the Improvement Programme to cover our entire trust, which is why we are now in the process of launching our transformational scale-up of the programme.

Want to find out what else we are doing to improve our care? Take a look here