A quick guide to support patients’ choices to avoid long hospital stays has been launched
NHS England and partners published a series of Quick Guides to support local health and care systems. The guides provide practical tips, case studies and links to useful documents, which can be used to implement solutions to commonly experienced issues.
The quick guides:
• bring clarity on how best to work with the care sector;
• help you to find out how people across the country are working with the care sector to reduce unnecessary
• hospital admissions and delayed transfers of care;
• break down commonly held myths, for example, sharing patient information across integrated care teams and continuing healthcare assessments;
• allow you to use other people’s ideas and resources;
• enable you to break down barriers between health and care organisations.
The latest multi-agency Quick Guide (published March 2016) to ‘support patients’ choices to avoid long hospital stays’ encourages hospitals to have conversations with patients early and properly inform them about the choices for patients and carers to find a care placement on discharge from hospital.
It aims to provide better support to patients and families in making their choices and to support health and care systems to reduce delayed transfers of care.
Drawing on the work of local government, health and social care organisations, this guide contains practical tips, examples and links to useful documents:
• A checklist for local areas to use to identify areas for improvement;
• Information on existing solutions to common problems, including tools to support choice and environments to support choice (e.g. intermediary placements).
• A template policy and template patient letters which can be adopted locally.
This latest Quick Guides and all others in the series can be found here on the NHS Choices website.
