An award-winning psychiatric liaison service, pioneered by Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust at City Hospital is to be adopted by four hospitals in the region.
The Rapid Assessment, Interface and Discharge (RAID) service – devised and developed by our trust as part of a pioneering partnership with staff at City’s busy A&E unit, in Winson Green – will be available at the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, Heartlands Hospital, Good Hope Hospital and Solihull Hospital by April 1, 2012.
The extension of this enhanced psychiatric liaison service, which provides a 24-hour service at City Hospital, marks a change in fortune for RAID, which only last year faced an uncertain future despite winning a Health Service Journal Award for mental health innovation.
RAID was established by our trust, in partnership with Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, in December 2009. It was the first service of its kind to work with an acute partner, to improve patient outcomes, streamline care and, in the process, make significant savings to the public purse.
It was originally set up as an 18-month pilot scheme, but was extended in March 2011 after additional funds were secured from local commissioners to plug a £600,000 funding gap.
The clinical and financial impact of RAID has received national recognition in a report by the London School of Economics (LSE) for the NHS Confederation, published last November, which praised its innovative approach for improving patient outcomes and saving money.
Conservative assumptions on savings, made in the LSE’s report, revealed RAID could make savings of £3.55 million a year, based on saving 14,500 bed days at a rate of £245 per bed day.
Previously people could face lengthy waits before being referred onto the relevant service but under RAID, clinicians are able to assess patients within an hour of arriving at A&E or within 24 hours if on a ward. Since April 2010, the service has been available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at City Hospital.
RAID will initially operate seven days a week between 8am and 8pm, at the Queen Elizabeth, Heartlands and Good Hope Hospitals. The service at Solihull will be initially run between 8am and 8pm weekdays and 8am to 1pm at weekends. This will become a round-the-clock service at the hospitals later in the year.
Professor George Tadros, a consultant in old age liaison psychiatry and lead clinician for the service, said: “This is excellent news for patients across Birmingham and Solihull, now that the other major hospitals are following our lead, after seeing what we have achieved at City.
“RAID is an innovative mental health model which has significantly improved quality of care in acute hospital for patients with mental illness and alcohol problems and especially for older people with dementia.
“It is exciting as RAID potentially could become a national model which has the ability to save the NHS a colossal amount of money by improving quality, instead of cutting essential services.”
The development comes as our trust is preparing to stage its inaugural national conference on RAID, to share our experience and expertise, which is being attended by Professor Alistair Burns, the Government’s dementia tsar.
Prof Burns, the national clinical director for dementia, is one of two high profile keynote speakers attending the RAID conference at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham on January 27, 2012.
Peter Spilsbury, director of commissioning development for Birmingham and Solilhull NHS Cluster, will also address delegates at the event.
The conference aims to show clinicians and commissioners how innovative thinking can save millions of pounds and improve patient outcomes.
