Visit to Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust

Earlier this week our chief executive Daniel Elkeles enjoyed a hugely engaging and positive visit to Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHT), to see a trust focused on providing hospital level care at home and getting upstream to identify early opportunities to prevent deterioration.

Daniel said: "KCHT have recently been in the news for their partnership working. They lead the community, primary and social care collaborative for the County and have recently combined with mental health and learning disabilities collaborative to enable a more holistic approach to neighbourhood health. They were successful in becoming the lead provider for the county wide re-procurement of community services in partnership with Medway Community Health (a community interest company) and HCRG Care Group (a private provider).

"A focused area of work involved the East Kent population as it has a huge and fast growing elderly population with 300+ nursing homes in the area. Much of the focus is on how to keep this population healthy and out of hospital. Their philosophy is that a comprehensive assessment of need is required as soon as it is possible to carry it out to get the best response for an older person's needs.

"Their work is showing some great results with 60% of emergency and urgent care for the over 90s now provided in community settings and hospital mortality for older people decreasing by 16% compared to a regional average decrease of 6%."

There are great innovations underway to achieve this, including:

🔵 Combining virtual ward, urgent community response into a single team 7 days per week.
🔵 Working with South East Cost ambulance to take c15-20 elderly patients a day from the 999 stack.
🔵 Opening in October a new neighbourhood health centre in Thanet bringing together GP practices, community services and diagnostics into one place.
🔵 Using risk stratification to identify the patients most at risk of admission.

"The next step is to fully bring their local hospital into the partnership because they are sure that they can reduce hospital admissions further!

"Thank you so much to Mairead, John, Rakesh, Sarah, Ash and Shelagh for putting on such a great visit."