Optimising hospital patient flow

Managing patient flow effectively is fundamental to any hospital and its operational efficiency and long term sustainability. Maximising the use of finite resources, while ensuring safe high quality patient outcomes, is a core objective that all healthcare providers strive to achieve.

The recent winter pressure and demand has seen elements of the debate become common currency beyond the confines of the care sector. Two defining themes – the identification of a winter bed crisis in the NHS, exacerbating what many identified as a systemic shortage of beds, alongside the risks and ramifications of a potential flu pandemic – have combined to place the issue of patient flow into sharp focus. 

However, debate has often been dominated by emotive language describing patients left in A&E corridors, or of care journeys culminating in bed-blocking as elderly patients become ‘stranded’ in the wrong care setting. These defining events are routinely held-up as either representative of an NHS that is an unwieldy bureaucracy, or a system reeling from being consistently under-resourced and not designed to meet patient demand. Noticeably, health and social care systems that have adopted best practice to improve flow find themselves much better able to cope with external pressures than those that have not.