Intervention | Description |
SAFER patient flow bundle8 9 | Multifaceted interventions based on best practices that include daily senior review, documentation of clinical discharge criteria, documentation of the expected date of discharge, early admissions and discharges, and multidisciplinary team review of patients with extended lengths of stay. |
Bed utilisation visual management and tracking system11 12 | A visual management system to that is based on the NHS RED and GREEN bed days. RED and GREEN is a visual management system to assist in the identification of wasted time in a patient’s journey and used during the board round. A patient shall be marked as RED if he receives little or no value-adding acute care. A patient shall be marked as GREEN when he receives value-adding acute care that promotes his progress towards discharge. Additionally, the system tracks the status of inpatient beds. Each unit has a board or screen that summarises the status of all patients admitted in that unit. |
Emergency admission bed huddle7 | The emergency admission bed huddle is a planning tool for improving patient flow. A multidisciplinary team meets daily to discuss and act on admissions to the hospital from the emergency department and manage fluctuations in patient presentations by promptly allocating boarded patients to inpatient beds and authorising out of specialty admission. The huddle is led by a medical executive and includes representatives from the emergency department, critical care, inpatient units, nursing and bed management. |
Hospital flow teams13 | A specialised team that is led by a hospital executive and includes physicians, nurses and bed managers. The team meets on a weekly basis and is responsible for maintaining patient flow and bed placement across hospital units, by monitoring hospital flow measures, elevating bottlenecks and supporting flow improvement activities. |
NHS, National Health Service.