Heaviness past, heaviness present and heaviness future with Neil Pettinger

In this Huddle I'll be welcoming Neil Pettinger, Kurtosis, who is going to be talking to us about measuring, describing and finding solutions to exit block in acute hospitals.

It is generally accepted that a significant obstacle to patient flow in acute hospitals is exit block. Patients cannot leave emergency departments (EDs) in a timely fashion because of the lack of empty beds. And the delays thus experienced by these patients, plus the knock-on effect of their delays on the time it takes to treat other patients in the ED, means that ED length of stay – and therefore four hour compliance – is made worse by this lack of empty beds. But this relationship between bed fullness and long stays in the ED isn’t quite so easy to measure or describe in time of extreme dysfunction. In such times, the beds are nearly always full Which makes it difficult to distinguish between those occasions when the beds are full and these occasions when the beds are not full. There aren’t enough latter occasions to enable a meaningful comparison! Hence exit block defined conventionally as the number of beds occupied falls short as a metric that explains long stays in the ED. We therefore need to refine and develop our measure of exit block so that it helps explain long stays in the ED. This presentation/talk proposes a method for refining and developing the way we measure exit block. I explore three ways in which length of stay can be incorporated into our measure of bed fullness so that it helps to better explain how exit block affects length of stay in the ED.

This Huddle will be of interest to anyone who'd like to know more about measuring, describing and finding solutions for exit block in acute hospitals.

It will be interesting to:

• analysts whether or not you work with patient flow
• managers/clinicians working in acute hospital unscheduled care
• those who want to learn about exit block and how to fix it

Who is this session for?

Open to all health and care analyst and anyone in health and care who'd like to know more about the exit block and ways to measure this that could improve patient flow in acute hospitals.

📅 Date: Thursday 2nd October

🕚 Time: 11:00 – 12:00

📍 Online (free to attend)

N.B. Join this Huddle via the Eventbrite link from this invitation or the normal MS Teams Link

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