Doctors and nurses focus on ‘The Perfect Week for Patients’

Doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals working across The Royal Oldham Hospital are getting ready for ‘The Perfect Week for Patients’ – part of a national initiative to improve the quality of care by solving the problems that can delay a patient’s journey from treatment to discharge in hospital.

For one week, every ward in the hospital will have extra help to support busy staff to identify and overcome problems and to see what support is needed to smooth the patient pathway to ensure there are no delays.

The initiative will focus on every single aspect of the patient pathway to improve the way that patients move through the various steps in the whole local health and social care system, from the local GP surgery, ambulance service, through treatment in the hospital, and then discharged home or out into the community.

Dr Anton Sinniah, acting medical director at The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “This approach had been developed by the NHS nationally and many other hospital Trusts have used The Perfect Week idea to make long lasting improvements to their services and to improve patient care and the patient experience.”

The Trust has experienced the same pressures as other hospitals with significant increases in the demand for hospital care. This has led to busy, crowded A&E and assessment units, increased length of stay and sometimes the need to cancel some non-urgent elective surgery.

The Perfect Week for Patients aims to address these issues by:

• Ensuring that all patients receive the right care in the right place at the right time
• Improving the patient experience of health and social care by smoothing their journey through hospital and the local health and social care system
• Re-energising frontline staff by giving them the time and space to try new ideas and to identify their own solutions to overcome delays
• Working with primary, community and social care to improve patient flow and look at better ways of working together.

Hugh Mullen, Director of Operations at the Trust, said: “By the end of each week we expect to see shorter waits in A&E and improved patient flow across our hospitals by discharging patients where it is safe to do so, freeing beds for other patients to be admitted.

"We will do this with the help of our partners in primary, community and social care and many of them will be joining us on the wards during The Perfect Week for Patients to see the issues first hand.

"This is a great opportunity to work with local primary care and social care partners to focus finding ways to both improve services in a way that is sustainable across the local healthcare system.

"The object is to find solutions to our shared problems that we can apply throughout the year for the benefit of our patients and their families.”

The first Perfect Week for Patients begins on Wednesday 10 June, for The Royal Oldham Hospital with two further weeks planned for Fairfield General Hospital and Rochdale Infirmary, and North Manchester General Hospital in late June and July.