Healthcare Commissioning Forum

By service redesign programme for the care of children presenting to accident and emergency departments. Senior paediatricians would triage children, and one quarter of children who would previously have been admitted would be managed as outpatients or in the community, releasing savings of £129 million across the NHS.

The NHS Institute has undertaken a rapid improvement programme, focusing on achieving a 25% reduction in admissions of children and young people by managing them in an ambulatory manner, rather than admitting them as inpatients.

This is based on reducing the number of children admitted and providing alternative pathways for their care, including more senior decision making at the front door to ensure that patients get the right care, in the right place, first time.

The proposal is to replicate the programme across more NHS sites, reaping similar benefits in cost and quality to those that have been observed in the current delivery sites.

There are potential scalable benefits of £129 million to be achieved by reducing by 25% both the number of emergency admissions and the number of children and young people who present at emergency departments.

For further information, please visit:  https://arms.evidence.nhs.uk/resources/qipp/29513/attachment