“Winter continues to be the busiest time of year for hospital admissions and remains a key concern for many people working in the healthcare industry. At Health Innovation West Midlands (HIWM), we have been working alongside key stakeholders, Sandwell and West Birmingham and South Warwickshire Foundation Trust, on a new national project – the NHS Insights Prioritisation Programme (NIPP), which aims to help ease the burden on hospitals and emergency services. 

 “The purpose of this West Midlands project is to support people in the region by addressing health inequalities and provide point of care testing in the home. Sandwell, West Birmingham, and South Warwickshire are working to avoid the conveyance of older patients with frailty to hospital, this can be achieved through diagnostics and acute medical intervention, and through enhanced support from community teams with input from secondary care. 

 “Through projects such these we can provide essential medical support at patient’s homes to enable greater independence whilst improving overall safety and enabling patients to be in comfortable surroundings. This is something that we know patients want so we hope that through evaluating this project through NIPP we can evidence a new model of care.   

“Delivering high quality and frailty-attuned acute assessment and ongoing care outside congested acute hospitals is a very high priority for the NHS and these two solutions are being evaluated as part of the NIPP project. 

 “Primarily findings will be ready in spring 2023 followed by the ARC West Midlands evaluation and subsequent implementation guides.”  

 Results will include:   

• Barriers and facilitators of new acute medical care models.   

• Comparison of the challenges from setting up remote clinical advice/integration with acute hospital frailty models and direct medical care in the home enabled with POC testing and real time choice of intravenous treatment. 
• Intra-organisational strategies to embed and sustain new approaches to acute medical care.