A journey through virtual wards with Dr Paul Hudson
08 March 2024
Dr Paul Hudson is operational medical director at Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust. Since 2022, Since 2022, Dudley has developed an advanced virtual ward programmes, supporting patients across respiratory care, frailty, paediatrics, heart failure, acute medicine and complex nutrition.
Following success of the first virtual care ward, Black Country Integrated Care Board (ICB) invested in Graphnet’s remote monitoring technology and successfully expanded hospital-at-home services and launched the UK’s first paediatric virtual ward. The paediatric virtual ward was the first to be established in the country to support children with illnesses such as Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), as well as children stepping down from higher dependency care and those with complex conditions.
Q: Hi Paul, can you tell us about virtual wards at the Dudley Group?
A: Since 2022 we have a developed a virtual ward programme spanning a range of specialties, with wards for respiratory, frailty, paediatrics, heart failure, acute medicine and complex nutrition to name a few.
Like other trusts, our journey began during the pandemic when virtual wards emerged as a safe and effective solution to care for patients in the comfort of their homes. This transitioned into our respiratory ward which soon began to demonstrate benefits, such as reduced length of stay. We then launched our other virtual wards based on clinical need. It has been great to see the passion and innovation shown by the teams involved in this new model of care. Winter has been tough, but having the ability to onboard a dozen patients a day onto the wards has been invaluable.
Q: Have you seen positive outcomes from using virtual care to support people in your region?
A: Absolutely, the feedback from patients has been overwhelmingly positive, highlighting the effectiveness and convenience of virtual care. It’s not just positive patient feedback, operationally we’ve experienced significant benefits as well.
For example, since we have launched our paediatric virtual ward we have not had any capacity alerts and we have not needed to divert children to other hospitals, despite seeing more patients attending our assessment areas than previous years.
From an individual patient point of view, the outcome data has been impressive, and we have been able to keep many more patients in their own homes.
Since speaking at Rewired, Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust has continued expanding its virtual ward programme, reporting significant operational and patient benefits including reduced readmissions and bed day savings.
- 10+ patients onboarded daily
- Reduced hospital attendance
- Reduced length of stay
- Reduced readmissions
- 90% drop in attendance for one patient
Q: What do you particularly enjoy about your role?
A: One of the most fulfilling aspects of my role is being able to work across the whole organisation, and also to be able to ‘place work’ with our community services and colleagues in primary care.
Q: What are you hoping to hear being discussed by other speakers at Rewired this year? Any particular sessions that you’re looking forward to?
A: I'm particularly looking forward to hearing about sharing information between partners across Integrated Systems.
Thank you so much and we look forward to seeing you at Digital Health Rewired!
