Blog: Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Trust Workshops

From 7th-8th February 2024, Freddie Girling and Sarah Handby from the NHS Benchmarking Network’s “Managing Frailty in the Acute Setting” project team travelled over to Northern Ireland to do a series of workshops.

The workshops formed part of a programme of work, commissioned by the Northern Ireland Public Health Agency, to help the Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Trusts get the most out participating in the project. The project benchmarks data on services dedicated to the care older people in acute hospitals, and the workshops were designed to help Trusts turn this data into actionable insight that they can use to improve outcomes for older, often acutely frail, patients who are at risk from an extended stay in secondary care.

The workshops included a presentation from NHSBN team, with findings specific to each participating Trust, followed by a structured discussion facilitated by the Alison Patterson and Michelle Laverty from the Northern Ireland Public Health Agency.

Day 1: Wednesday 7th February

On the first day of the trip, the project team travelled to the Seamus Heaney Homeplace in Bellaghy, to meet with a delegation from the Northern Health and Social Care Trust. After the findings presentation, discussion turned to the ways in which dedicated care of the elderly wards can be set up to prevent patient deconditioning, including schemes to get patients out of their beds frequently, and signage around the ward that is appropriate for patients with dementia. This discussion was supported by examples from responses to free text metrics that were submitted to the project in 2023. Short stay bedded assessment and admissions units for frail and older patients were also discussed, about which a significant number of new metrics were added to the project for 2023.

Day 2: Thursday 8th February

The second day of workshops was hosted at the Assembly Buildings Conference Centre in Belfast, with a morning session scheduled for the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust and an afternoon session scheduled for the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust. Discussion at the morning workshop revolved around project findings on the different pathways that older patients in Northern Ireland are discharged on, following a stay in an inpatient ward. In response, the Northern Ireland Public Health Agency suggested that they would investigate creating a standardised process for coding discharge pathways in Northern Ireland.

Representatives from the Belfast Trust also expressed an interest in submitting more data on their Allied Health Professional workforce, which is now being built into the 2024 project. The South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust began developing an acute frailty team in their Emergency Department in response to findings from the Managing Frailty project in 2022.

As such, during the afternoon session, representatives from the Trust were interested to discuss how they might use project findings to track the growth and impact of this team, both this year and in the future.

Conclusion

All the workshops were very successful, with fantastic engagement throughout each session. Following the two days in Northern Ireland, the project team hosted an online workshop for representatives from the Western Health and Social Care Trust (who were unfortunately unable to schedule an in person event), and the Northern Ireland Public Health Agency commissioned another year of the bespoke Northern Ireland Managing Frailty project. We look forward to continuing to work with them, and the Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Trusts, in the future.