Communication between primary and secondary care -physicians is often unreliable and one sided in the form of clinic letters. Alternatively, general practitioners (GPs) may have difficulty contacting an on-call specialist via outdated hospital paging services. At Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, a gastroenterology email advice line was set up to promote dialogue and potentially help GPs deal with issues within their practices. The service has been evaluated both objectively through analysis of enquiries and subjectively through a -survey of GPs' views. Analysis showed a very high level of satisfaction among users of the service. There is also good evidence to suggest that the service has helped to streamline patient management and led to the avoidance of some outpatient appointments.
Medical day hospitals (MDH) provide multidisciplinary care to older people living with frailty in an outpatient or day-case setting. Given the pressures on UK emergency departments (ED) combined with the rising numbers of frail older adults presenting as emergencies, we hypothesised that it would be possible for our MDH to be used to provide multidisciplinary ambulatory care for a subset of older patients presenting to ED. With adequate resources, this could potentially provide comprehensive geriatric assessment in an older-friendly environment with the additional benefit of improved flow within the ED. This paper discusses outcomes for the first 100 patients transferred from the ED to be assessed and managed within the MDH instead. Clinical judgement was used to select older patients who were likely to be able to go home the same day after assessment and multidisciplinary input within the MDH. As expected with a highly selected cohort, of the 100 patients transferred, 92% were discharged, noting that medical admission had already been planned for 31% of these patients prior to the involvement of the geriatrician. In conclusion, it is feasible for a cohort of older patients presenting to the ED to be managed within the MDH instead with additional potential for reducing avoidable admissions.