Unscheduled Care

Unscheduled care can be defined as health and/or social care which cannot reasonably be foreseen or planned in advance of contact with the relevant professional. It follows that such demand can occur any time and that services to meet this demand must be available 24 hours a day seven days a week. Improving the patient pathway through the Emergency Department for either subsequent admission or discharge is the most important challenge for the Hospital and requires collective commitment from all medical, surgical and diagnostic services. In this regard the Hospital constantly seeks to apply a multi-disciplinary approach to the implementation of change as in the embedding of Care Programmes.

The Hospital has undergone substantial change as a result of the implementation of various strategies and one of the most significant outcomes has been to increase ED attendances by 30% to 65,000 over the past 5 years.

This coupled with the implementation of other strategies has necessitated a challenging change programme in which the implementation of new processes is a key part. The commitment of staff to continue to implement change particularly at a time of very constrained resources has resulted in significantly improved patient pathways and outcomes

Significant work has been undertaken collaboratively with the National Care Programmes

• Acute Medicine Programme
• Surgical Programme
• Emergency Medicine Programme
• Acute Coronary Syndrome Programme
• Paediatric Programme
• Critical Care Programme
• Orthopaedics and Trauma Programme

“Flow is a Team Sport – contact us with your ideas on Aideen.ORiordan@hse.ie  ”