University Hospital Dorset’s outpatient assessment clinic has been selected as a finalist in three categories in the Patient Experience Network National Awards.
The clinic, based in Beales in Poole’s Dolphin Shopping Centre, opened last year in response to the long waiting lists caused by the pandemic and is helping to reduce waiting times and increase the accessibility to life-saving screening. It is one of a number of clinics across the county that make up the Dorset Health Village – the other in South Walks House, Dorchester – and together they give patients the opportunity to also access free health and wellbeing support from LiveWell and Active Dorset in a community setting.
Since opening, as well as delivering thousands of Covid vaccinations, the clinics have seen over 10,000 patients, have had great feedback from patients, and received a number of high profile visits to see how the model could be adopted elsewhere across the country, including from Amanda Pritchard, chief executive of the NHS.
Mark Mould, chief operating officer at UHD, said: “We’re delighted to be finalists for these awards, especially as our focus has always centred around the patient experience. By moving some of our services closer to the community, we had the opportunity to not only reduce waiting times and increase access in these areas but also enable earlier identification of disease and improve outcomes for our patients.
“The impact of Covid has demonstrated the importance of good health and wellbeing and it’s fantastic to see wellbeing services fully integrated and embedded in these clinics, support people to make healthy behaviour changes and to ‘wait well’ for any procedures they are waiting for.”
The clinic has been shortlisted in the following PENNA categories: Partnership working to improve the experience, Integration and Continuity of Care, and Using Insight for Improvement. The winners will be announced in September 2022.
NHS England published revised guidance for adult visiting to hospitals earlier this year. In our maternity services at Poole Hospital, we took the opportunity to review our attendance and visiting guidance, taking into account the additional needs of birthing parents, the un-born and new-born baby, and the environments we are providing maternity care in.
We had been delighted to lift the visiting restrictions as an optimistic sign of return to normality for women and their families. However, in light of the guidance, risk assessments were undertaken within the department and due to the size of the bays and numbers in the bays it was deemed that visiting needed to be restricted.
These include:
This decision was taken very reluctantly by our senior team based on further advice from infection prevention control, taking into account the outdated design of our maternity unit at St Mary’s. This is also in line with Dorset County Hospital which also does not have partners staying overnight in a bay with women and babies.
We also have to take into account helping to protect the privacy, dignity and safety of all mothers and their babies in our maternity wards. We want to ensure that our mothers are able to have protected time and this is not possible with visitors there 24 hours a day. The midwifery matrons are aware that most service users find it very comforting to have a relative or their partner present but that in a shared ward, they also have concerns about sleeping while strangers are awake and in the same room.
We have worked hard to ensure that not all partners are banned from staying overnight but instead individual decisions are made for those women who have special circumstances, such as those with disability, significant communication challenges or complex medical, mental or social factors which necessitate additional social support. We have accommodated postnatal women in other areas such as the birth centre and the bereavement suite in order for them to have their partner stay overnight. Both of these areas have ensuite facilities which are necessary when a partner is accommodated overnight.
The visiting risk assessments will be kept under review by the Trust in line with national guidance and local prevalence of Covid as well as taking into consideration our estate and footfall in certain areas. Our visiting guidance for maternity are published here.
Dorset's integrated care system (ICS), Our Dorset, has been shortlisted in five categories for this year's HSJ (Health Service Journal) Awards, including two nominations for Integrated Care System of the Year and Performance Recovery.
The HSJ Awards is an annual event that celebrates the very best of health care across the UK. Of the 1067 entries for this year’s awards, 219 projects and individuals made it to the final shortlist, including the five Our Dorset projects.
Our Outpatient Assessment Clinic at Beales is up for two awards, Performance Recovery and ICS of the Year for the partnership with Arts University Bournemouth to design the clinic in a way that helped visually guide patients through their journey.
The Dorset Medical Examiner programme, which scrutinises deaths across the county and gives the bereaved a voice to raise any concerns, is one of those in the running for ICS of the Year.
For a full list of the nominations visit the HSJ website here.