Background

 

The Better Care Together (BCT) plan aims to deliver support to the citizens of Leicestershire

in a co-ordinated way when they find themselves in need of services.

 

 

The plan recognises that people rarely need support from a single service as they age or if they are vulnerable through mental ill health or disability. People often find difficult to navigate between services and feel that there are barriers in the way as they move between health, social care and other statutory services. The barriers that citizens find as they try to access different statutory services are not understandable or acceptable to the population. As a result, this plan aims to reduce and eventually remove those barriers by working towards a fully integrated service provision with people at the centre of the services that Leicestershire delivers.

 

The Better Care Together (BCT) five year Strategic Plan was launched in late June 2014 and it sets out challenging changes for health and social care for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. This five year plan maps to key quality improvement metrics for sustainable care as set out in the Better Care Fund (BCF), such as reduction in avoidable emergency admissions.

 

Four of the current interventions developed by Leicestershire County Council and NHS partners are aimed at reducing the overall number of emergency hospital admissions due to falls, frailty and short term care crises:

 

• Integrated Crisis Response Service (ICRS)

• Older Persons Unit

• Urgent Response Falls Service

• 7-day Services in Primary Care

 

These four new intergrated care interventions have been selected to be evaluated as part of the Leicestershire's BCF programme in order to test their impact and effectiveness and to ensure that patient/service-user metrics provide an adequate test of the integrated service care experience. 

 

Objectives

 

The purposes of the SIMTEGR8 project are to evaluate how emergecy admissions to hospitals can be reduced and

help improve the patient journey through new integrated interventions.  

 

The objectives of this study are to:

 

• Evaluate the current interventions to identify the critical points (touchpoints, handoffs and failure demand) for the patient journey.

• Provide Innovation and testing of some new models of thinking and metrics that could be implemented to align transformation of health and social care related to patient journey experience.

• Influence policy nationally by building an evidence base and online application to inform the design of future service delivery. 

 

The 1-year project will form an important piece of work that will contribute to the ongoing evaluation of the impact of the Better Care Fund programme. A robust evaluation of the impact of new integrated care interventions on admissions to hospital will provide important evidence to inform the future health and care commissioning plans.

 

 

 

 

Project Plan

 

Building on previous research and the three types of SimLean (Robinson et al. 2012)

the project would consist of three key stages:

 

 

1. Evaluation (Jun-15 to Jan-15)

 

Building on the concepts of Simlean Facilitate, the project will evaluate the four interventions outlined above through rapid modelling of the patient flow and carry out a series of workshops with stakeholders and service users.

 

 

2. Development (Aug-15 to Feb-16)

 

Utilising Simlean Evaluate, the project will model the integrated patient journey for the four interventions and develop a dashboard of key metrics to measure service user experience.

 

 

3. Testing (Dec-15 to Feb-16)

 

Through building on Simlean Educate, the project will develop an online-based tool for wider use and dissemination for influencing the future design of integrated services.