The SHarED project aims to improve outcomes for the most frequent and/or impactful users of Emergency Departments (EDs). Patients known as ‘High Impact Users’ (HIUs) attend our Emergency Department up to 80 times per year. The SHarED Project seeks to reduce their attendance rates, along with improving the experience of both staff and patients.
The SHarED Project launched in August, following a delay due to COVID-19. All six Emergency Departments across the West of England are now following this approach with the final trust going live last week.
Since launching, the HIU co-ordinator and consultant in each Emergency Department have been working hard to build on their existing services to align to the SHarED High Impact User model; developing paperwork, referral mechanisms, communication strategies and local triage tools.
Using their triage tools, the teams have started to prioritise patients who either attend most frequently or have a significant impact on the department upon attending. The Personal Support Plans for prioritised patients will be holistically developed through a multi-disciplinary approach, aiming to improve patient and staff experience, alongside reducing Emergency Department attendances. The project team have developed an implementation guide and a suite of working documents to support local ED teams.
A staff experience survey that seeks to understand the culture for managing High Impact Users in the department has been completed by all trusts. The results are currently being analysed and we look forward to sharing these results and learning from them to further improve services.
Megan Kirbyshire, West of England Senior Project Manager commented
‘We are really excited that the SHarED Project is finally off the ground, with COVID-19 it’s felt like a long time coming! All of the project teams are make excellent progress with getting their services set up and starting to develop Personal Support Plans for the patients that they have triaged. Due to the nature of the project, it will be a while until we can start to see the impact of the service on individual patients, but we are currently working on understanding the results from the Staff Experience Survey and the High Level Datasets, both of which are already showing some interesting patterns.’
You can find out more about SHarED here or by contacting Megan Kirbyshire, megan.kirbyshire@weahsn.net who can also provide updates on what is happening locally in your Emergency Department.
Posted on October 5, 2020
SHarED: Supporting high impact users to Emergency Departments
This project aims to improve outcomes for the most frequent users of Emergency Departments.
Resources for implementing SHarED
These resources support the implementation of a High Impact User Team and give advice and guidance on achieving successful SHarED implementation in your emergency department.
