Gloucestershire health and care teams are involved in two shortlisted entries for the HSJ awards and HSJ Patient Safety Awards.

Shortlisted for the ‘Data-Driven Transformation’ Award, a One Gloucestershire ‘High Intensity Use’ project has been using a population health management approach (i.e. looking at data) to identify people who use health and care services more frequently than they need to.

Working with a multi-disciplinary team made up of consultants, nurses and social prescribers, people are supported to increase their knowledge, skills, and confidence to manage their health and wellbeing themselves in a different way.

A project aimed at earlier identification of deteriorating patients in the community has been shortlisted in the ‘Deteriorating Patients and Rapid Response Initiative of the Year’ category of the HSJ Patient Safety awards.

The project focused on patients under the care of therapy teams in Integrated Community Teams. Therapists were taught how to do simple health monitoring e.g. pulse, blood pressure, temperature, during their community visits using appropriate clinical equipment and then to communicate findings to their medical colleagues. Results showed a huge increase in the confidence of therapists.

Appropriate patients can now get the medical care they need in a more timely fashion and better patient outcomes and safety have been achieved as a result.