On 29th July 2010 a team from Gwent Frailty project called for a conference which was attended by professionals from different backgrounds to discuss the details of the Frailty Programme in Gwent which is going to be started in April 2011.The first key note speaker in the conference was Alison Ward from Torfaen County Borough Council. The title of her presentation was: Frailty Programme: focus – requirement, programme and strategy
She said that the present NHS system in Wales is broken and unsustainable. She mentioned examples of unnecessary admission to the hospitals all around the country as an indicator of the difficulties in the current practice. Adding to that is the problem of the Length of stay and delayed transfer of care or DTOC.
Alison mentioned that 50% of people in hospital community beds do not need to be there and too much money invested badly in acute service.
In her presentation Mrs Ward mentioned that the aim of the frailty programme is to achieve a better outcome for frail people: fewer acute hospital admissions, shorter stay in hospital, improved flow via secondary care service, 24/7 access to community service and reduce hospital acquired infections. Reduction of the demand for complex care packages is another important aim of the project.
Regarding financing of the project, the conference was informed that this can be done on the short term through pump priming transitional funding from the Welsh Assembly Government to set up the new teams and to manage the high demand for community based service.
On the medium term, closure of community beds and overall reduction in the pressure on acute care and reduction in purchasing the residential and nursing homes will be the financial resource for the frailty project. On the longer term, the conference was told that the reduction in the cost of continuing care packages will be one of the targets to finance effectively the frailty project in Gwent.
The second key speaker was Lynda Chandler, the programme manager, Torfaen County Borough Council. She discussed some details regarding the workforce developments, governance and the structure of the frailty programme. She addressed the issue of the integration between the community mental health team and the community resource team as part of the comprehensive assessment tool for a better service for frail citizens in Gwent.
The third speaker was Dr Gwyn Thomas, chief information officer, informing healthcare and the title of his presentation was: strategic direction for community informatics.
He mentioned that the best way forward is to deliver community set of patients centred information service that improve care, safety and trust. He gave details of his vision regarding the service user’s and provider’s portals.
There were three work stream sessions in the conference addressed issues of mapping the call management process, assessment and management of work/ allocation and unified assessment based community records.
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