NHS Forth Valley is no stranger to hosting visitors from overseas and post-Covid this trend has continued with delegations from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Prague, capital of the Czech Republic.
Delegates from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Centre for Value in Health visited the Day Medicine Unit at Forth Valley Royal Hospital as part of a wider programme organised by the Scottish Government to showcase Realistic Medicine and Value-based health and care.
They also met with staff involved in some of taking forward value management initiatives within the Day Medicine Unit and Mental Health Services. The approach aims to support teams working within health and care services to continuously improve their services, by providing coaching, using quality improvement skills and data about quality and cost.
In Day Medicine, a multidisciplinary group was established to work with local staff and patients in the Unit to identify areas for improvement. This included capturing feedback on staff and patient experience, introducing a board in the Unit with details of local aims and targets linked to experience, cost, capacity, safety and quality. They organised regular huddles involving all staff and disciplines to collaborate on areas for improvement, change ideas and develop plans to take these changes forward.
Some of the improvements included significant cost savings linked to changes in how certain drugs were administered (more patients were able to receive this drug at home rather than having to come into the Unit), a reduction in the number of patients who failed to attend their appointments and improved staff and patient experience.
A team of visitors from Prague also visited the Scottish Centre Simulation and Clinical Human Factors at Forth Valley Royal Hospital as part of a collaboration on simulation safety work. The week-long programme covered critical care, research and transformative and undergraduate simulation. It was supported by a range of staff from the centre as well as nursing, AHP, quality and governance leads.
