Florence: Delivering Mid Nottinghamshire’s Oxygen@Home Service

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Florence: Delivering Mid Nottinghamshire’s Oxygen@Home Service

posted 15 Jan 2021, 07:16 by Hollie Stirman

Jayne Birch-Jones

Change Management lead – Assistive Technologies, Connect Nottinghamshire

Emma Moore

Team Lead – Community Urgent Response Team, Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust

15 January 2021

Flo "most effective and safest tool to use to ensure good quality of care"

for Oxi@Home Service in Nottinghamshire

“Florence” has been in use across Nottinghamshire since 2012 supporting the delivery of a wide range of pathways across health and social care. Our ICS currently averages between 600 – 800 patients using Flo at any one time which for us is low whilst we develop a role for dedicated staff to support and develop further pathways. However even so, this is a great indicator that our staff and patients value Florence as part of their health and care and that she is a recognised, mainstreamed tool across Nottinghamshire.

In November, like all other ICS’s across the Country, we were tasked with setting up an Oxygen@Home service. In Mid Nottinghamshire ICP, the Community Urgent Response team were asked to deliver the service. The team leader had previously utilised Flo within other patient cohorts and recognised that Flo was the most effective and safest tool to use to ensure good quality of care to this patient group, while having the least impact on staff workload.

The benefits identified included:

Safe patient care - patients are immediately given advice according to our locally agreed pathway if clinically indicated via their response to Flo; there is no need to wait for instructions or to contact the team on the telephone.
Immediate clinical notification to facilitate early intervention reducing risk of further admission - clinical staff receive an email and text message notification if a patient breeches their set parameters - no need to log into the dashboard.

Management of deteriorating patients - clinicians can view deteriorating patient’s readings via dashboard
Clinical record data - patient’s readings submitted via Flo can be quickly uploaded into a spreadsheet and attached to the clinical record.
Cost effective – reduction in administration time and cost for telephoning patients; subsequent cost avoidance associated with timely and appropriate clinical intervention.
Real-time patient evaluation data - patient experience is collected as part of our local protocol on day 15.

As members of the Simple Telehealth Community of Practice, we based our protocol on good practice from another area and learned from their experience (thank you Northern Care Alliance!). Locally we had a Microsoft Teams call to agree the protocol with our clinicians, tested it with staff, trained the trainer and within a week went live in one of our Primary Care Networks. Our referrals are slowly increasing which will ramp up as access is opened up to other refers and we roll the pathway out to the rest of the ICP. We have also applied for some additional funding via the East Midlands Academic Health Science Network to fund expansion to more patients.

A big thanks to the national Flo team for all their support and amazing response times!