Beneficial innovations from COVID-19
03 July 2020
At the end of May, NHS England and NHS Improvement called for health and care professionals to submit examples of innovations that had been implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic and should be retained as the NHS returns to business as usual.
We know that this virus has disproportionately affected older people and, as such, BGS members have been at the forefront of the pandemic and have been implementing innovative solutions to enable them to deal with the unprecedented demand for services during the pandemic while protecting staff and non-COVID patients from the virus.
BGS members contributed examples of innovations that have been implemented in their areas which we have organised into ten themes:
- Proactive anticipatory care for older people with frailty
- Urgent primary care response
- Specialist-les assessment and treatment at home
- Coordinated multi-agency support for care homes
- Person-centred advance care planning
- Age-attuned acute care
- Safe, effective and timely transfers of care
- Optimising recovery and rehabilitation
- Virtual clinics
- Digitally-enabled care
Our report of these beneficial innovations includes advice on enablers for local services to implement these innovations and what is needed centrally for them to be sustainable across the system.
This report is England focused but many of the themes will be relevant across the four nations.