The Assistant Director of Unplanned Care and Community Care Market introduced this report which provided an update and overview of the key challenges and priorities faced by the Urgent Care system.  There were three major priorities being worked toward and the progress was given:

1. reduced long length of stay – this was not on track and had been tackled by a system lead at Board level;
2. increased number of patients streamed from Emergency Department to community support – this was on track with about 50 people a day streamed. Investments in point of care were being looked at to enable primary care to support more people;
3. ambulance handover and turnover times reduced with corridor waits eliminated – there had been significant improvements but also a dip in school’s half term week because of staffing. Planning for future such holidays was being looked at.

The report also included an update on the Urgent Treatment Centre (UTC) which was to have a newly constructed building in 2022 but before then a new community model would see Minor Injuries Units being replaced by standardised Primary Care Hubs in April 2020.

Members questions drew out additional information including:

·  Preparations for Winter included capacity planning in acute treatment, community care and primary care with a draft Winter Plan agreed. There was a focus on minimising additional beds by improving support at earlier stages.

·  Long lengths of stay were being tackled in different ways depending on whether the cause was an internal acute reason or external community or primary care reasons. Externally there had been more referrals to re-ablement and domiciliary care than there was capacity, and internally there would be focus on 0-20 days as well as people on the 21-day threshold.

·  Modelling of solutions had been done and would result in 80 free beds if everything worked at optimum level, but that would also benefit staff workloads, winter planning and morale.

Resolved - That the contents of the Urgent Care Update report be noted.