Improving availability and accuracy of the junior doctors' on-call handover through digitalisation.

Clinical handovers from out-of-hours activity are essential for relaying information about events such as new admissions, outstanding or complete investigations, physical health reviews, ward jobs and risk. This information enables the day team to effectively prioritise and follow-up any necessary tasks.Junior doctors at a hospital site in the London Borough of Newham were aware that the existing handover system, constituted of a word document circulated via email, was lacking robustness and that the handover was not sent out reliably on a daily basis.Quality improvement (QI) methods including process mapping, PDSA ('Plan, Do, Study, Act') cycles, driver diagrams and run charts were used to understand the issue, create a more robust process and measure the improvements made, all supported by regular QI project meetings. The change ideas included moving from an informal Microsoft (MS) Word document, which was emailed out, to an Excel spreadsheet stored centrally on MS Teams. Column headers were added for admissions, ward jobs, seclusion reviews, matters relating to mental health law and Accident and Emergency (A&E) assessments, as well as defined columns for outstanding jobs and standard tasks that need to be completed for all admissions. Responsibility for circulating the handover list was given to the incoming day duty doctor if the night doctor was too busy, with admin support to chase the circulation of the handover. Results were studied for the following 18 months.The percentage of handovers being appropriately sent out increased from a median of 80% to 100% during the project period, and the availability of handover data where the data were visible to doctors on MS Teams but had not been sent out also increased from a median of 80% to 100%. The system was deemed safe, effective and easy to use, and has already been replicated at neighbouring hospitals.

Reducing bed occupancy and length of stay on a functional older adults' psychiatric ward.

A quality improvement project was initiated on Ivory ward, a functional older adult psychiatric inpatient ward at Newham Centre for Mental Health, part of the East London NHS Foundation Trust. The project was started by staff on the ward after it had come to their attention that their ward had the highest bed occupancy and length of stay across similar wards in the trust. The mean bed occupancy in the 9 months before the project started was 87.7%. The mean length of stay on the ward in the 9 months before the project started was 70 days. The team used the model for improvement, which is the trust's methodology of choice for quality improvement projects, to reduce bed occupancy and length of stay. The focus was on running small-scale tests of change to see whether these could lead to improvement. These change ideas were refined, scaled up or discontinued as appropriate to help achieve the aim. The project's aim was to promote quality of care by reducing patient length of stay on Ivory ward to 45 days and bed occupancy to ≤70% or by 1 January 2016. The project team managed to reduce bed occupancy to 58% and length of stay to an average of 35 days.