112 Right patient, right bed, right time

<h3>Background</h3> Deciding which patients should be prioritised for admission to an in-patient hospice from different referral sources, when the number of referrals exceeds the number of available beds, can be challenging to get right. <h3>Aims</h3> To improve the identification of patients with the greatest specialist palliative care needs and reduce the time from referral to hospice admission for these patients. <h3>Methods</h3> The measures used were the mean, range and standard deviation of waiting time from referral to admission in days. Each week, this data was calculated for urgent and non-urgent admissions separately – urgency was determined retrospectively from the electronic patient record following admission. Baseline data was collected over 2-months and a further two rounds of data after each intervention. The interventions constituted introduction of daily Teams meeting with referrers and implementation of a validated triaging tool called RUN-PC. <h3>Results</h3> Average time from referral to admission at baseline was 2 days (SD of 2.5) for urgent patients and 3.5 days (SD of 3.5 days) for non-urgent. This improved following implementation of the daily Teams meeting and improved further still to 1.4 days (SD 1.7 days) for urgent patients and 3 days (SD of 3) for non-urgent patients. <h3>Conclusion</h3> Daily discussions with referrers and implementation of a validated triaging tool have been well received by hospice staff and referrers alike and have reduced the time between referral and admission for all patients but more significantly for the admissions categorised as urgent.