A journey through virtual wards with Dr Paul Hudson

Dr Paul Hudson is operational medical director at Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust. Dudley has been operating a growing number of virtual wards out of four acute hospitals since early 2022. It rolled out the UK’s first Paediatric Virtual Ward at Dudley Hospital, which has been extremely successful and has also deployed virtual wards in other specialities.

Q: Hi Paul, can you tell us about virtual wards at the Dudley Group?

A:  Since 2022 we have a developed a virtual ward programme spanning a range of specialties, with wards for respiratory, frailty, paediatrics, heart failure, acute medicine and complex nutrition to name a few.

Like other trusts, our journey began during the pandemic when virtual wards emerged as a safe and effective solution to care for patients in the comfort of their homes. This transitioned into our respiratory ward which soon began to demonstrate benefits, such as reduced length of stay. We then launched our other virtual wards based on clinical need. It has been great to see the passion and innovation shown by the teams involved in this new model of care. Winter has been tough, but having the ability to onboard a dozen patients a day onto the wards has been invaluable.

Q: Have you seen positive outcomes from using virtual care to support people in your region?

A: Absolutely, the feedback from patients has been overwhelmingly positive, highlighting the effectiveness and convenience of virtual care. It’s not just positive patient feedback, operationally we’ve experienced significant benefits as well.

For example, since we have launched our paediatric virtual ward we have not had any capacity alerts and we have not needed to divert children to other hospitals, despite seeing more patients attending our assessment areas than previous years.

From an individual patient point of view, the outcome data has been impressive and we have been able to keep many more patients in their own homes.

Q: What do you particularly enjoy about your role?

A: One of the most fulfilling aspects of my role is being able to work across the whole organisation, and also to be able to ‘place work’ with our community services and colleagues in primary care.