From Saving Bed Capacity to Service Transformation - The Virtual Wards Conference 2023 Rundown

The Convenzis Virtual Wards South Conference saw medical professionals and innovators come together in the heart of London focused on today's service delivery challenges. With practitioners and leading health tech figures taking the stage to share their current experiences with, and future ambitions for, delivery of virtual wards using technology enabled care.

Hosting speakers on stage was chairman James Davis, founder of Inicio Health (a digital innovations consultancy company) Davis welcomed doctors, clinical directors and tech founders from all over the UK onto the podium, to deliver their presentation on delivery and the transformation that has taken place over the previous year. With ambitions to reconstruct the NHS currently 'outdated' healthcare model, speakers told of initiatives taken to relieve pressures in the face of the NHS' overwhelming demands for care, particularly focusing on solutions to ease lack of bed capacity in hospitals, establish new robust pathways monitoring and supporting patients at home, and providing tools to support communication and organisation amongst a workforce struggling in the face of demand.

Figures from the likes of Ortus Solutions Limited, PMD Solutions, Access HMC–as well as doctors, senior nurses and clinical leads from various trusts projects, delivered their own presentations and case studies to highlight how this can be achieved through a remote, patient-centric approach utilising new practices and tech enabled care.

After an introductory to virtual wards was given by Stephanie Sommerville (The Director Of Community Health Services in Transformation and Virtual Wards). The panel opened up to a Q&A debate, discussing the advantages and challenges faced when patients are cared for at home. By monitoring and managing acuity levels patient admissions can be reduced enabling low risk patients to them to remain within the comfort of their homes, freeing up hospital bed capacity for more urgently deteriorating patients identified as deteriorating and then appropriately admitted. Overall the approach results in less emergency admissions and a reduction in un-necessary hospital appointments. Patients on wards provided vitals and symptoms information from a number of devices and questionnaires and are assisted and closely monitored by their clinicians providing convenience for the patient, efficiency for the clinicians and flexibility for both with virtual consultations and messaging as a means of communications.

Discussions from panellists followed plans of providing an Integrated care model that would offer a secure, scalable, and robust clinical platform allowing the storing of patient data in a singular space and improved patient condition information and education, supporting patient management . Alan Payne, Director of Access HSC stressed the importance of making the quality of care more "personal". Dr Debashish Das, CEO of Ortus Solutions Limited, spoke about the value of symptom questionnaires in addition to vitals when regularly provided by patients at home through their portal. Allowing clinicians to identify deteriorating patients quickly and more efficiently with a single source of truth in the form of data. Talking about the Atlas pathway he described how it had already saved one NHS trust 330 bed days (￡135,000) in 4 months. He also highlighted that virtual wards do not necessarily decrease NHS staff workload, but does allow more patients to be seen, "Allowing patients at risk to be prioritised, which should be the focus."

Other presentations included the invention of a device that was implemented to remove the technology burden off of healthcare professions for the management of a late stage COPD patient?cohort in the community.?Myles Murray, Founder of PMD Solutions showcased the success of the continuous reparatory rate monitoring device developed by Letterkenny University Hospital partnering with eHealth which achieved 100% hospital?avoidance over 12 weeks in Gold D (Gold 4E 2023) COPD patients. Whilst Senior Programme Manager of Blended Learning in Health Education, Karen Pudge turned the focus on developing a better future workforce within the NHS through blended learning. The use of both vital in-person methods of education alongside the new opportunities technology has allowed education in the health workforce. Boosting accessibility of healthcare courses to individuals who would otherwise be unable to find the time to start a pre-registration or undergraduate course that's solely in person.

For further information on the event and the full list of panellists and their presentation summary, you can visit the Convenzis website at: https://www.convenzis.co.uk/events/the-nhs-virtual-wards-conference. NHS and Public Sector staff are free to attend this and conferences taking place in future. Future event dates are accessible on the Convenzis website.