MOBILE HEALTHCARE FACILITIES
Outsourcing to private providers, which incurs both loss of funds and, critically, loss of control of the patient pathway, as well as inconvenience for the patient, who must travel to an unfamiliar hospital for treatment.
Engineering innovative solutions within the boundaries of the existing hospital estate, utilising flexible infrastructure.
An innovative approach
The good news is that many Trusts have taken innovative steps to address these challenges and achieve the best utilisation from their hospital estate. One of the solutions employed by a number across the country is to utilise mobile buildings. In our view at Vanguard, flexible infrastructure is set to play an increasingly central role in future community-focused healthcare systems; it provides substantial benefits for healthcare providers and patients alike by maximising the potential of existing hospital estates. Mobile facilities can be used to address a wide range of capacity issues, and are tipped to play a significant role in Simon Stevens’ vision of the future NHS. The benefits are available now, and many Trusts have demonstrated how this flexible solution can effectively address fluctuating demand.
The use of mobile buildings in healthcare can provide an immediate solution to capacity challenges; this immediacy enables Trusts, for example, to temporarily increase capacity on site, ensuring that patients remain on the NHS pathway. Mobile healthcare units permit Trusts to add capacity when it is most
Installation of a mobile unit in progress.
needed, whether during winter months, during refurbishment, in response to emergency situations, or when Trusts simply need more flexibility and are undergoing service redesigns – for instance when enabling elective and diagnostic services in a community setting.
Executing an effective refurbishment
The East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust identified that every year demand for its diagnostic endoscopy procedures had increased by roughly 30% among its population of over 520,000. Demand was exceeding the Trust’s capabilities, and a backlog began accumulating, meaning that more and more patients were waiting longer for their diagnostic treatment. Rather than allowing the backlog to build up, the Trust considered
its options carefully, and evaluated the best ways to manage the soaring demand. This led to the establishment of a long-term plan to reduce existing backlogs with additional temporary capacity, before moving to a seven-day-a week endoscopy service. Before the work commenced in August 2016, Amanda Philpott, chief officer of NHS Hastings and Rother Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and NHS Eastbourne, Hailsham and Seaford CCG, remarked: “One of the priorities under the East Sussex ‘Better Together’ programme is to detect and treat illness earlier, so we are very pleased to provide funding that will provide much more endoscopy capacity locally and allow local people to be screened swiftly.”
While improvements were underway on the Trust’s existing facilities, a state-of-the- art Mobile Day Surgery unit was employed, which provided a self-contained clinical environment, complete with a reception, anaesthetic room, procedure room, and six-bay recovery ward. The unit was installed next to the Conquest Hospital’s Richard Ticehurst Unit in Hastings, and integrated with it via a custom-built walkway. Despite being directly connected to the hospital’s facilities, the unit was capable of independently admitting and discharging patients.
Dr Phil Mayhead, Endoscopy lead at ESHT, was delighted with the unit, and the additional capacity it provided, noting: “We are pleased to be able to create this extra capacity to enable us to see more patients. This has brought us into a good position to treat patients in a timely manner. Developing a seven-day-a-week service will be good for patients, improving the quality of service we offer.”
A Vanguard ‘Visiting Hospital’ arrives at its destination. 34 Health Estate Journal March 2017
Logistics and site planning The Mobile Day Surgery was supplied by Vanguard Healthcare Solutions – which operates the UKs largest fleet of mobile healthcare units, and provided the additional capacity needed to enable the first stage of the Trust’s strategy. The unit
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