The NHS in the North East and Yorkshire is now able to treat over 1,200 patients from the comfort of their own home using virtual wards, and capacity is only set to increase this winter. 

The expansion will allow patients to get hospital-level care at home safely and in familiar surroundings, helping speed up their recovery while freeing up hospital beds for patients that need them most. 

Virtual wards allow patients to get safe hospital-level care in the comfort of their own home, close to their friends and family. Patients are monitored around the clock by highly skilled clinical staff through home or virtual visits, and staff can use technology like apps, wearables, and other medical devices, to continually monitor patients’ vital signs. The teams can also provide blood tests, prescribe medication, and administer fluids via an intravenous drip. 

One year on from the Urgent and Emergency Care recovery plan, the NHS has rolled out new ways of working as well as bringing in more capacity – from most trusts using Same Day Emergency Care centres and Urgent Community Response teams, the continued roll-out of Acute Respiratory Infection hubs, to meet our aim of 10,000 virtual ward beds nationally, ahead of target.

Hospital at Home was first launched across the North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust area several years ago, to treat people with the lung condition COPD. In autumn 2022 it was expanded, to include patients who are older or frail. The programme, a partnership between the NHS trust and local GPs, is now growing rapidly with social care services also involved. Over the past 6 months alone, the frailty virtual ward has saved over 1,400 bed days. 

An innovative virtual wards pilot in Bradford has halved the number of days an end-of-life patients spends in Hospital. Palliative care consultants at Bradford Royal Infirmary have been working the Marie Curie Responsive Emergency Assessment and Community Team (REACT) virtual ward to keep patients with a terminal diagnosis out of hospital and cared for in the comfort of their own homes. The scheme was instigated after research found that end-of-life patients spent an average of a month in hospital in the last year of their life. On average the initiative has reduced the number of days a terminally ill person spent in hospital from 38 to 17.

In Hull and East Riding, the team working as part of City Health Care Partnership CIC are at the beginning of their frailty ward journey. Their aim is to implement a safe and effective virtual ward, enabling them to care for people in the place they call home. This requires integrating acute frailty emergency department teams, intermediate care, urgent care, specialist community frailty team and other providers, including Primary Care Networks.

NHS England in the North East & Yorkshire is supporting systems to develop clinic pathways and starting to explore the benefits of Paediatric virtual wards.

Dr Yvette Oade, Medical Director for NHS England in the North East and Yorkshire, said: “Virtual wards allow patients to get safe hospital-level care in the comfort of their own home, close to their friends and family.

“This approach will not only help speed up recovery times for patients and cut down on unnecessary trips to hospital, but also free up beds for those who need them the most.” 

NHS clinical guidance published in October 2023 asked local health systems to expand their use of virtual wards to include heart failure patients who often spend a lot of time in hospital and can now get specialist care from the comfort of their own homes.