‘Personalised Care in the Community’ is the title of our latest podcast and, in this last of the series edition, we’re focusing on how personalised care can be used to keep people healthy within their homes and local communities.
NHS @Home is a national programme aiming to ensure people have faster access to more appropriate and targeted care, without necessarily having to attend emergency care or arrange GP appointments. Talking about this exciting scheme in the latest edition of our Personalised Care Podcast, we haveLaura Bimpson Head of Implementation for NHS @Home, Matt Inada-Kim Acute Medicine Consultant at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital, and National Clinical Director for Infection, Antimicrobial Resistance and Deterioration and Shahed Ahmed, NHS England Medical Director for the South East and National Clinical Director for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention.
Reflecting on how the programme helps people to stay healthy and well within the local community, Laura explains: “This is about a different model of care that builds on the significant digital transformation that we’ve seen in the use of digital technology over the past few years and what we’ve seen as a result of the pandemic.
What we are doing, is really harnessing all of those beneficial changes that we’ve seen so we can accelerate recovery and transformation and ultimately create a more comprehensive offer for digitally enabled, home-based services across the whole of the country.”
Under the NHS @Home umbrella are several different programmes, one of these being virtual wards. Inspired by the successful use of oximeters to monitor patient health during the COVID-19 pandemic, Matt discusses how virtual wards and providing people with the technology to monitor their own health are essential: “Improving health care outcomes doesn’t lie in a hospital. It doesn’t really lie in a GP surgery either. It lies in a patient’s own home. The more we educate and empower patients with not only knowledge but also tools to actually look after themselves, the better their outcomes are going to be. […] This is about giving power and resources to patients and the general public.
Collaboration between primary and secondary care is cited as essential to delivering integrated care models which enable the best access to personalised care for patients. Going a step beyond this, Shahed explains how, to deliver the best health outcomes for all, we must ensure equal access, and engaging community figures is central to this. She says: “As healthcare clinicians, we are only a part of the health infrastructure that looks after individuals, and they are embedded in their communities. Communities are really interested to know about health and how to protect their own health. So, working with community leaders, I think, is absolutely crucial.”
Find out more about NHS @Home and the effective delivery of personalised care in the community now. Listen for free on your chosen platform: https://omny.fm/shows/personalised-care-podcast/