Expanded OPAL+ service helps reduce hospital admissions
Published on 23/08/2022
An expanded virtual consultation service is helping to avoid unnecessary hospital admissions for older patients.
In Spring 2022, the Older Person’s Assessment and Liaison + service (OPAL+) expanded its virtual consultation service to more than 15 community health and care partners across Birmingham.
In the last six months, this expansion has resulted in OPAL+ being contacted almost 1,500 times from community health and care colleagues, who believed their patient may need to be taken to hospital.
After triaging, the OPAL+ team was able to ensure that 1,000 of these patients remained in their own surroundings with wraparound care, rather than being admitted to hospital.
OPAL+ is part of the OPAL service, established in 2017 by University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB) to help prevent unnecessary hospital admissions.
In 2019, OPAL began a collaboration with the West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) to take this approach one step further by introducing the use of technology to enable virtual consultations in the home.
The recent expansion includes community and mental health teams, as well as the Community Palliative Care Team, to help reduce hospital admissions of palliative patients and ensure they are managed in the community.
The QEHB Pharmacy has also come on board. It sends out urgent to help patients to avoid visiting the Emergency Department or an urgent care facility.
The OPAL+ team is forecast to receive more than 2,200 phone calls by the end of the year.
Dr Abi Gupta, OPAL+ lead and Consultant Geriatrician at UHB, said: “We knew that that our collaborative virtual consultations were reducing the need for WMAS to take emergency patients to hospital.
“With the advent of the pandemic, introduction of new discharge to assess (D2A) guidance, the new integrated care system and the pressures on the WMAS services, we accelerated our growth plans to widen our service to community partners.
“We are seeing a raft of benefits alongside helping patients to avoid unnecessary hospital admission. These include helping to free up ambulances to respond faster to other calls, delivering clinical expertise in a timelier manner and delivering swifter, more appropriate patient care.”
