New patient ‘flow’ project to assess improvements in patient care in Wales

The Health Foundation has committed nearly half a million pounds to Hull University Business School to undertake an independent evaluation of a programme aiming to improve the flow of patients through the health and social care systems in Wales.

The evaluation will look at the impact of the Wales’ 1000 Lives Improvement Patient Flow Programme which began in June 2013, and includes six Welsh local health boards. The goal of the programme is to help services manage the flow of emergency patients better, and to improve patient outcomes, leading to fewer delays and resources being managed more effectively. It also aims to ensure that the priorities of quality, safety, delivery and reliability, which sometimes compete, are all included as part of the process of improvement.

The patient flow programme is run by 1000 Lives Improvement service, which supports organisations and individuals to deliver the highest quality and safest healthcare for the people of Wales.

As an independent health care charity working to improve the quality of health care in the UK, the Health Foundation has previously funded work looking at the relationship between flow, cost and quality at two acute hospital trusts: South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The experiences of the teams at Sheffield and Warwick revealed many benefits of applying a flow approach including reductions in mortality for frail people occurring in hospitals, and potential costs savings through enabling prompt discharge at the point that it is clinically appropriate.

The evaluation team will be led by Professor Steve Johnson at Hull University Business School’s Centre for Systems Studies, who commented: 'My colleagues and I are delighted to be selected by the Health Foundation to undertake this important evaluation and we are looking forward to exploring the impact of patient flow initiatives on the quality of heath care.'

Dr Alan Willson, director of 1000 Lives Improvement, said: 'Inspired by the Health Foundation’s sponsored work in Sheffield and Warwick, NHS Wales organisations are making considerable progress in applying the learning and the evaluation will use existing hospital data and real-time feedback between it and the programme. This is a wonderful opportunity to gain important learning to include in future work.'

Helen Crisp, Assistant Director of Research at the Health Foundation comments: 'It is very important for us to understand how an improvement initiative, that has been shown to be successful in one or two places, can be applied at scale across a range of health care organisations.  This evaluation provides an important opportunity to study and learn from a country-wide improvement programme, and we are looking forward to working with colleagues in Wales and Hull on this project.'

The final evaluation report will be due in September 2016. 

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Mike Findlay, Media Manager
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