Hospital Flow: Pandemic Lessons Learned

James Rudy would be the last person to say that dealing with the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has been easy. As Senior Director of Integrated Operations at Northwell Health (New York City, New York), he does, however, express satisfaction that he and his colleagues have taken what they have learned about improving hospital flow over the last two years of the pandemic and put those lessons to good use.  

“All this hospital flow work was happening [while Omicron started surging],” Rudy noted, “and it felt like much of the work around load balancing and staff redeployment for COVID was behind the scenes because it was running so smoothly.”

While at the epicenter of the first COVID-19 surge in the Northeast United States in early 2020, Northwell built on what they had learned as participants in the IHI Hospital Flow Professional Development Program in 2018. They worked on load balancing patients across hospitals. They addressed safe staff redeployment, clinical pathways, and PPE usage. “We learned how to do all of this while avoiding major disruptions in the typical day to day work that happens within the organization,” Rudy explained. “It’s been exciting to see how much of what we put in place before and at the beginning of COVID has helped in subsequent waves.”

In the following interview, Rudy shares his lessons learned — including those that apply to small health systems with fewer resources — and describes why a collaborative approach to learning across Northwell Health has kept teams actively engaged in improving flow even during COVID-19 surges.

Full article here

Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic to Improve Staff Well-Being

Health care organizations around the world are constantly faced with the difficulties of building and maintaining a culture that supports not only patients, but also point-of-care teams. Uncertainties related to COVID-19 make these challenges harder. Leaders must determine how to keep employees safe, engaged, and supported.

Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust (RFL), with the support of goShadow, adapted the “What Matters to You?” (WMTY) framework to understand what mattered most to its teams in times of crisis. A series of conversation-based questions and a plan to launch the survey solicited the participation and feedback of all the Trusts’ nearly 15,000 employees. The resulting qualitative and quantitative data was collected during the height of the UK’s first COVID-19 surge in 2020 — while many respondents were under lockdown or redeployed — to identify what was going well, key learnings, and opportunities to improve aspects of safety, culture, and environment. The same process was followed to prepare for the UK’s second surge of COVID-19 in 2021. The survey gathered additional feedback and measured if the changes that senior leaders implemented in response to the 2020 survey added value and resulted in greater satisfaction from the employees’ points of view.

Further information is available from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Special Saturday clinic sees nearly 100 children

The Academy of Fabulous stuff | nd | Special Saturday clinic sees nearly 100 children

Experts at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT) saw nearly 100 children in a day when a special clinic was held to help reduce waits for families which had built up during the pandemic.

The glue ear clinic was run by KCHFT’s Paediatric Audiology Team for children with hearing issues. Normally, these young patients would be seen one at a time, but the team decided to trial a Saturday clinic to help more children — faster.

Glue ear is where the empty middle part of the ear fills with fluid. It can cause temporary hearing loss, but usually clears up within three months.

The aim was to make sure children were able to have two assessments, ideally 12 weeks apart, to give them and parents reassurance or so they could be referred to the local ear, nose and throat (ENT) department, if necessary.

Ninety-six children were invited; 49 were discharged, 25 were to be reviewed again, parents cancelled nine appointments and 13 did not attend. (Source: Kent Community Health)

Full details are available from Kent Community Health