19 June 2023

CNWL’s Urgent Community Response Team in Camden, in partnership with Doc Abode, has been shortlisted for a HSJ Patient Safety Award for its innovative work in the community using dynamic staff scheduling software in urgent access services.

Following a thorough judging process, CNWL’s Appsolute Magic programme was shortlisted, ahead of the official awards ceremony in Manchester on 18 September 2023.

At this first stage of judging, the shortlist was set against three clear criteria; clinical and specialist excellence; enacting organisation-wide change and service/system innovation. Appsolute Magic was shortlisted in the new category of Urgent and Emergency Care Safety Initiative of the Year.

Delivering high levels of patient care and safety in the community is critical to address one of the greatest challenges in the NHS; of hospital admission avoidance and the safe discharge of patients from hospital.

CNWL approached this challenge by working differently, using the Doc Abode eScheduling application to improve the productivity of staff through the use of a real-time, dynamic scheduling tool. Prior to Doc Abode the service used an Excel spreadsheet in combination with the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) to allocate visits to clinicians which placed a high administrative burden on the team and limited responsiveness. The Doc Abode tool also swiftly enables the best matching of clinician skills with the job and provides useful information to staff such as the best route to a patient’s home, patient-specific care details and warnings for lone-working.

Since launch 9,580 patient appointments have been scheduled using Doc Abode’s real-time dynamic eScheduling software, broken down in the following major service Pathways:

  • 3986 Urgent Community Response (UCR)
  • 2741 Discharge to Assess (D2A)
  • 1041 Virtual Ward

During this time the team maintained and improved the key national target for UCR of over 70% attendance with 2-hour response and maintained the NHS ambition of up to 50 virtual beds per 100k population. The UCR team also experienced a doubling of productivity since implementing Doc Abode.

A CNWL Clinical coordinator commented of the benefits:

“Knowing where staff are in their day allows me to make the right decisions on patient selection, knowing if someone has gaps, the right skill set and current location to see a new patient and quickly knowing of a staff incident/issue”.

Toby Daniel, Lead Nurse Rapid Access & UCR at CNWL, said

“Throughout the NHS there are massive staff shortages - so that is why we need to optimise our time, and why DocAbode coming in is hugely important to us because we can see a live snapshot of what’s going on, and ultimately then we are able to optimise how we’re keeping patients out of hospital, seeing more people each day to do that.”

The Award organisers noted that a record-breaking 515 entries were received for the HSJ Patient Safety Awards 2023, with 209 organisations, projects and individuals making it to the final shortlist.

The full list of finalists for the 2023 HSJ Patient Safety Awards can be found at https://awards.patientsafetycongress.co.uk/shortlist-2023.

Winners will be announced during the awards ceremony at Manchester Central, on 18 September  2023.