In a step toward modernising patient care, Medway NHS Foundation Trust has delivered a virtual ward programme led by its Surgical, Medical and Acute Recovery Team—better known as the SMART Team. This nurse-led, multidisciplinary team of consultants, nursing associates, therapy assistants, and physiotherapists is transforming how patients recover from acute conditions and treatments, offering hospital-level care from the comfort of home.

Operating seven days a week across Medway and Swale, the SMART Team supports up to 30 patients at a time, delivering remote monitoring, therapy, and nursing care using cutting-edge digital tools. The initiative not only enhances patient experience but also significantly reduces pressure on hospital beds. In just one month, the virtual ward saved over 1,500 bed days, with each day of virtual care costing just a third of an in-hospital stay. The onboarding process is swift—averaging just 20 minutes—and the nurse-to-patient ratio is an efficient 1:20, compared to 1:5 on traditional wards.

Partnering with health tech provider Feebris, the Trust has also deployed a new digital platform that supports all clinical conditions across specialties, ensuring a truly patient-centred approach. This seamless transition to virtual care was completed in just six weeks, without disrupting services or adding strain to staff. At its core, the programme is driven by a simple but powerful ethos: measuring what matters. By tracking outcomes, efficiency, and patient satisfaction, Medway is setting a new benchmark for virtual care in the NHS.

As virtual wards become a standard across the health service, Medway’s SMART Team stands out as a model of innovation, compassion, and operational excellence—proving that recovery at home can be just as safe, effective, and dignified as within hospital walls.

The Quail AI-powered Patient Experience Tool is transforming how Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust captures and responds to patient feedback. By analyzing unstructured data from complaints, PALS, compliments, and patient safety incidents, the tool automatically identifies recurring themes, emerging trends, and opportunities for service improvement—insights that traditional manual methods often overlook.

Since its implementation, the Trust has seen a marked improvement in its responsiveness to patient safety concerns and feedback. The AI tool enables a more proactive, data-driven approach to patient care, allowing teams to act swiftly and strategically. As a result, the Trust has introduced meaningful changes, including the review and standardisation of appointment letters and the rollout of enhanced telephony services to improve telephone access. The Quail tool is helping the Trust close the loop on patient concerns and continuously refine the quality of care it delivers.

Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, in collaboration with local GP practices, has launched a new pilot programme called Frailty Virtual Care, aimed at supporting patients with long-term conditions from the comfort of their homes. This trial, running until April 2026, will engage 200 moderately frail patients across selected primary care networks. The goal is to help individuals maintain their health and independence while reducing the need for hospital visits or in-person check-ups.

Participants are equipped with remote monitoring tools—including a pulse oximeter, blood pressure cuff, and thermometer—and are asked to regularly submit information via a dedicated app. GPs review this data and respond to any early warning signs, often beginning with a phone consultation. This proactive approach allows clinicians to intervene before minor health concerns escalate into serious complications, ultimately reducing the need for more intensive care.

While the Trust already uses similar technology in its Hospital at Home service, which provides short-term acute care, the Frailty Virtual Care programme is designed for longer-term, non-acute support. By extending monitoring over a 12-month period, the initiative aims to empower patients to manage their conditions more effectively and avoid frequent hospital admissions—marking a significant step forward in personalised, preventative care.

Frimley Park, Heatherwood, and Wexham Park hospitals are leading the way in cardiac care with the introduction of the Philips ePatch—a compact, adhesive device that revolutionizes how heart rhythm disorders are detected. Following successful pilot studies, the Trust is now the first in the UK to offer the ePatch to non-admitted patients and those receiving general cardiology care.

The ePatch replaces traditional Holter monitors with a discreet, matchbox-sized sensor that allows for faster, longer-term ECG monitoring. Compared to conventional methods, which rely on wired electrodes and require frequent hospital visits, the ePatch can detect up to 2.5 times more clinically relevant arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation and angina—while offering patients the convenience of use from home.

Data captured by the ePatch is analyzed using Cardiologs, a cloud-based AI platform that delivers diagnostic insights within 72 hours via a simple traffic-light system. This streamlined approach significantly reduces turnaround times and labor-intensive processing, enabling clinicians to act on results more quickly and efficiently.

While traditional Holter monitors will remain in use for some inpatient scenarios, the ePatch marks a major step forward in remote cardiac care. With productivity expected to double, the technology offers a smarter, more patient-friendly way to tackle heart rhythm issues at scale.

Patients visiting Royal Surrey’s Emergency Department (ED) are benefiting from cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help diagnose urgent conditions quickly and accurately.

Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust is at the forefront of adopting AI in healthcare, joining a select group of Trusts across the UK to implement an AI tool in urgent and emergency care settings to assist with reading chest X-rays.

The Annalise.ai chest X-ray tool uses AI to examine chest X-rays and identify up to 124 possible health issues in patients’ lungs, including serious conditions like cancer and collapsed lungs. By notifying medical teams about potential problems, it helps doctors make faster, more accurate decisions, allowing for earlier detection and quicker treatment of life-threatening conditions.

Last year, Dianne Covey, 69, from Farnham credited the tech with potentially saving her life after her chest X-ray was analysed by Annalise.ai and detected stage 1 cancer. Ms Covey said: “I never really understood much about artificial intelligence but now I think that it might have saved my life. I am very grateful.”

A pioneering use of AI is transforming cataract care across the region including in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight and Frimley. Meet Dora—an intelligent telephone assistant developed in Oxford—who is changing the game for post-op patient assessments. By calling patients after their cataract surgery, asking key clinical questions, interpreting their responses, and identifying those who need follow-up care, Dora is helping deliver faster, more efficient service.

As a result, average waiting times for low-complexity cataract surgery in the region have dropped dramatically—from 35 weeks in January 2024 to just 10 weeks or less. Dora can even offer patients a choice of treatment locations based on proximity and waiting times.

In Frimley, the system has already freed up 530 hours of nursing time in the eye department. Within a month of launch, the average time between surgery and follow-up contact plummeted from 10 weeks to just two—with the call backlog cleared completely.

SHAPE Primary Care Network (PCN) serves a highly deprived population with significant cardiovascular risk factors, especially among ethnic communities. Ragstone Road Surgery, one of its practices, is located in among the five most deprived areas in the UK and faces longstanding challenges in engaging patients for hypertension and diabetes reviews.

To address this, the PCN has deployed pharmacists to remotely monitor patients’ blood pressure (BP) using home-based BP machines. If elevated readings are detected, patients are prompted to recheck their BP three times daily for seven days. Persistent high readings are flagged to GPs for intervention. This initiative targets patients with hypertension, diabetes requiring BP monitoring, or a history of cardiovascular events like stroke.

Results are showing than nine in ten patients are now managing to manage their own care successfully (up from about one in two), helping to release GP time for patients with more acute or complex cases and for those who need continuity of care, as well as saving patients from needing to make trips to the practice.