How do you make a Healthcare System fall over?
The NHS is having a difficult time at the moment - it has a difficult time every winter but this year looks worse than last and that was worse than the year before. Many hospitals now have no hope of meeting the Government target for 4-hour waits in A&E (less than 2%) for this quarter.
The answer that everyone is looking for is “How do we solve the crisis quickly?” but it occurred to me that there might be an alternative way to approach this problem …
Imagine we had a system of emergency care that is stable, predictable and capable of meeting the Quality Target. Now try to think of the easiest ways to push it out of control and into chaos – the only caveat is that they have to be legal, sound reasonable to the Board, and be feasible to implement.
What would your top 3 destabilising actions be?
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We looked at our data for this January meltdown. As I’ve seen many times before:
The admission numbers were stable
The discharges went down, and length of stay went up.
Why do we still believe January meltdown is due to pressure on our hospitals? The data show it’s due to the way we manage our services.
Radiology services are skeleton only
Consultant ward rounds happen lesss often
Support services in the community are harder to reach
Liaison with GPs doesn’t happen aas well
In short, our own systems fall over and that causes the meltdown!
Happy New Year
Set capacity at the average of demand over the last year and sit back and watch the fun