What is a data-driven NHS ‘war room’?

NHS England has announced that 24/7 control centres are to be set up across England this winter and some are calling these data-driven ‘war rooms’.

So what does this actually mean and is your NHS Trust ready to tackle this? Dick Wall, Healthcare BI Solutions Architect, Trustmarque discusses this below.

Considering this recent announcement around data-driven war rooms, what does this mean for the NHS? These hubs should be led by teams of system-wide professionals including local gov, NHS, and other clinicians and experts to manage demand and capacity. They will be keeping a close eye on beds in hospitals, and it seems where possible re-directing care to the community and local hubs dedicated to respiratory infections expected to be the most significant of winter pressures. There is also a focus on falls due to two in five hospital admissions coming from care homes are fall-related and there will be round-the-clock community mental health advice provision.

As the letter signed by the health service’s Chief Executive Amanda Pritchard, Chief Financial Officer Julian Kelly and Chief Operating Officer David Sloman was only signed this week and we are already almost into November!

I’m sure there are lots of questions to be answered, where is the budget coming from? Can you re-direct the workload?

Who will deliver this additional workload?
With our vast experience of gathering data from NHS source systems, we support more than 10% of acute trusts presenting data in dashboards we can support any trust or ICS with a rapid and effective response. Most importantly our understanding of flow and system-wide control can help the management team discover issues and develop new responses to the crisis. For instance, we can support Trusts to use the data and system thinking to identify improvements in related services such as transport, paperwork or communication delays, and arranging alternative care.

Our team at Trustmarque are technology experts who use that expertise to improve clinical outcomes through the use collection, collation and appropriate dissemination of data and information to front-line staff in all sectors including NHS, local government, and commercial organisations.

As well as world-class technology expertise, Trustmarque’s team of senior analytics consultants are also subject matter experts on patient flow having worked on multiple projects and held senior full-time roles responsible for patient flow. This means we understand the needs of the entire system and how capacity and demand, cause and effect are used to describe, measure and improve real work scenarios. No amount of data or analysis can solve critical resource shortages but a whole system view can improve flow and deal with the issues that are within the power of the system.

We can help you get the data you need from any NHS System, we can help you prepare and present it and we can support your control centre teams to understand where their resources can have the biggest impact on the overall patient flow and safety.”