Virtual wards

We talk to Adrian Flowerday about the need for Virtual Wards in the current climate and beyond

Tell us about the need for Virtual Wards, Adrian?

As the NHS enters a post COVID recovery phase, there’s a real and urgent need for the NHS to free up hospital beds. NHSE guidance, with funding to support it, has been released that strongly encourages the formation and use of Virtual Wards, and systems will be accountable for the provision of this new way of working. Virtual Wards are an effective way of taking patient care out of the hospital, while enabling patients to be monitored once they have been discharged earlier from hospital and back in their own homes. Digital remote monitoring is the enabler that allows patient recorded data to be safely and securely collected and presented to hospital staff. To date, the focus has been on COVID Virtual wards, and that’s where we’ve been doing lots of our work since the beginning of the pandemic. However, with this early experience and development of operating procedures, we are now seeing the principle being applied to other clinical pathways, such as asthma, pneumonia and heart failure. It’s great to see that there is national recognition for the need for Virtual Wards and we’ve been working with Liverpool on these since early on in the pandemic.

We’ve been working on ways to keep people out of hospital and transforming hospital care for many years, in fact, since we created Docobo in 2001. Remote monitoring is a proven and efficient enabler to allow clinical teams to care for people at home, and we were well placed to support and roll out Virtual Wards when the need for them came at the start of the pandemic.

In the UK, remote monitoring has seen rapid growth and adoption, due in part to generous funding by NHSX, who have not only funded systems to adopt remote monitoring but have also been foundational in sharing best practice and supporting project implementation. They have also implemented the Digital Health Partnership Award to help NHS organisations in England bid for funding to speed up adoption of digital health and to support patients with long term conditions to remotely monitor their health at home or in the community with digital products.