A team from the RPB along with operational and clinical leads from across health and social care went to look at the award winning Home First service in Carmarthenshire who are an integrated multi-disciplinary, multi-agency team who are co-located in a large office in Llanelli. Their main focus is to support timely discharge from hospital and provide community response to avoid hospital admission.
Previous visits inspired the development of the Safe@home service in Cardiff and Vale and members of that team joined the visit to continue to learn how we can develop our work as part of an Integrated Community Care System.
Our team were also able to showcase some of their work on Safe@home and also some of the work Sioned Owen, our Principal Analyst, has produced around tracking the benefits of hospital avoidance which will ultimately raise the profile of these types of services. Sioned is due to present this work soon to a national team as part of the 6 Goals for Urgent and Emergency Care to consider national adoption of the approach.
“The Home First team encompasses GP’s, District and Specialist Nurses, Community Allied Health Professionals (AHP’s), Social Workers, Delta Connect, Third Sector and Voluntary Services, Intermediate Care Services, Domiciliary Care Services, Residential and Nursing homes. All working together, prioritising proactive and preventative approaches through to crisis response approaches to optimise healthier days at home for the population, avoid unnecessary hospital admissions and facilitate their discharges home from hospital as soon as possible. This Intermediate Care Services, streamlined through a single point of access that is the Intermediate Care Multi-Disciplinary Team (ICMDT), and its significance in delivering ‘Home First’ in Carmarthenshire was initially introduced in October 2021” Building an Intermediate Care Team by NHS Wales Awards 2022 winners – Hywel Dda University Health Board – Improvement Cymru