Out-takes from event

Following our attendance at a local Hip Sprint event in December 2019, senior community physiotherapists from Leeds were inspired to catch up and explore the work undertaken in the original hip fracture audit completed by our trust in 2017. 

We are exploring how Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust can collaborate with the local acute trust to create joint rehabilitation pathways, with fractured neck of femur patients being the starting point. We’ve been re-working the therapy referral prioritisation criteria to improve our community service provision, and planning to see hip fracture patients by day two of hospital or community care bed discharge. The rehabilitation programmes and face-to-face contact time will be progressed to achieve the agreed standards set.

Working within a very busy multidisciplinary service our focus is  to support people at home, or their preferred place of residence, and to facilitate hospital discharges by providing same-day assessment as required. Clinical capacity is frequently taken up by rapid response assessments and assessing for temporary homecare ‘activity of daily  living’ support which the service  provides in conjunction with the local adult social care service.

In the current climate, the hip fracture standards will be difficult to implement immediately.

As we face the global COVID-19 pandemic, our therapy teams are currently pooling our resources and expanding our clinical skills to support the community nurses, care staff and the third sector  service.

However, when the health service returns to some kind of normality, the work will continue towards achieving the Hip Sprint Standards: working to establish a task and finish group with the hospital therapists, to create an integrated pathway from acute to community. The hope will be to present findings at a later Hip Sprint event. 

• Andrew Goldman and Paul Selkirk are both senior physiotherapists at Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust