The Deteriorating Patient – Handover to me, handover to you

The Safer Care Through Early Warning Scores programme has achieved great things during the last 18 months.  The National Early Warning Score (NEWS) is now used in all secondary care, mental health and community settings across the region, and good progress is being made for it to be routinely used in primary care.  The focus of the programme is now to reduce the risk to patient safety at the interfaces of care by considering and facilitating the communication of NEWS at patient handover across their care pathway.  This event will focus on this theme aiming to learn and share from experiences across the region and to agree standards and methods of communication of NEWS between organisations, underpinned by quality improvement science and methodologies.

The programme will highlight some of the great work we have achieved in the region and how we have progressed since the last collaborative event in March 2016.  We will ask the audience to break out in to smaller groups to consider in detail how NEWS can be communicated at the interfaces of care; learning from examples of good practice already in place and working on how these principles can be transferred into other organisations.  At this event, specific time will be set aside for our regional Sepsis Working Group, Emergency Department (ED) Collaborative and Community Forum linking together the patient safety work in the region focusing on the deteriorating patient.

Click here to view the agenda.

The main benefit of this event is it is an opportunity for all stakeholders who engage with other organisations at the interfaces of patient care being given the opportunity to meet one another and actively discuss how patient safety can be improved by using NEWS at the point of handover.  It is a unique opportunity for all our health service providers in the region to focus collaboratively on a common aim – to improve communication at the point of handover and reduce risks to patient.  This aim will be underpinned by quality improvement methodology and collaborative sharing and learning.

We would welcome attendees from all organisations working on patient safety initiatives to detect the deteriorating patient across the region.  Specifically, we would actively encourage attendance from primary and community care (including Mental Health services), GP referral units or single points of clinical access, South Western Ambulance Trust, Emergency Departments and secondary care wards so we can focus on the communication of NEWS at the interfaces of these services.  We would also welcome participation from patients, carers and their families to ensure our plans of work put patients at the centre of our programmes.