PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
Health Minister Lord Howe visits paediatric experts and patients
at Royal Brompton Hospital
Health Minister, Lord Howe, visited Royal Brompton Hospital today to see firsthand the work of paediatric experts who have developed a programme that enables children with breathing problems to get home more quickly. The Health Minister met staff and patients in the hospital’s paediatric intensive care unit and children’s ward.
The ability of children who cannot breathe for themselves to lead normal lives and enjoy their childhood requires effective communication between patients, their families and hospital and community services. However, systems to manage their discharge from hospital to home involve many different agencies and it can take many months to organise home care.
Working together, Dr Gillian Halley and Mr James Woods of Royal Brompton Hospital have developed e-vent, an award winning database to support decision making and improve communication between hospital and community services. This secure database will help ensure more effective coordination of care for children on long term home ventilation. Improving communication and offering outreach education and training enables children to be discharged more quickly from hospital and live at home with their families while ensuring that their medical needs are being fully met.
Health Minister Lord Howe, said: “I am pleased to see first-hand the benefits e-vent is making to children’s lives at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Children on long-term ventilation are often in hospital for long periods of time so it is good to see the real benefits this is bringing to patients.
“As set out in the Health and Social Care Bill we want doctors, who know what the most appropriate care is for their patients, to be able to improve health outcomes by tailoring services to patients' needs. This project not only allows families to be together, but shows how treatment can be more effective and efficient. It will also reduce the cost meaning savings can be channelled back into the NHS to improve services further.”
Dr. Gillian Halley, paediatric intensive care consultant at Royal Brompton Hospital, said: “We know from experience that children on long term ventilation who are medically stable would prefer to be at home with their parents, and we have seen significant improvements in their health and general well being after hospital discharge. What the child really needs is to be in a home environment where they can be picked up and cuddled, and have normal bedtimes, bath times and playtimes with their family. Under the current system there are many avoidable delays in discharge from hospital to home resulting in children staying in hospital longer than necessary.
“We are delighted to welcome Health Minister Lord Howe to Royal Brompton Hospital. We hope that the work carried out by the Children’s Long Term Ventilation Service and the e-vent web based pathway will continue to improve the speed at which care packages for children on long term ventilation are delivered, so that they can be discharged from hospital more quickly and be cared for in their own home.”
-Ends-
For further information, please contact:
Shima Islam, Head of media relations
Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust
Tel: 020 7351 8672 (Brompton)
Tel: 01895 828 877 (Harefield)
Mobile: 07866 536 345
Email: S.Islam@rbht.nhs.uk
Notes to editors:
Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust is a national and international specialist heart and lung centre based in Chelsea, London and Harefield, Middlesex. The Trust helps patients from all age groups who have heart and lung problems and is the country's largest centre for the treatment of adult congenital heart disease.
The e-vent database (electronic discharge pathway for children on long term ventilation) is a secure web based system for health and social care professionals. The database includes state-of-the-art features such as tracking key action points with automatic email alerts when expected time frames are breached; calendar features; equipment lists with order codes; and templates for key documents including professional reports, and discharge summaries. The database will also host key links to support networks available to families and carers as well as short online educational and training videos.
e-vent won the 2009 NHS London Innovator Award in Healthcare ICT category and was developed by Dr Gillian Halley (consultant in paediatric intensive care at Royal Brompton Hospital and lead for the Pan Thames Children’s Ventilation Service) and Mr James Woods (programme developer at Royal Brompton Hospital).
Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust’s paediatric team offers specialist services for children’s heart and lung disease, and comprehensive paediatric critical care services.
Last year (2009-10) was the busiest ever for the Trust’s paediatric heart surgeons, with over 400 operations carried out, many of them complex procedures on newborn babies. The appointment of new surgeons with the specialist skills needed to undertake such work and the more efficient use of beds and nursing time for postoperative treatment in intensive care, mean that the Trust can help more babies born with serious heart problems than ever before.
Responding rapidly to critically ill children is part of the daily work of the paediatric team, which is a national specialist referral centre for children with heart and lung disorders – the largest in the country for those with heart rhythm problems.
