Norfolk County Council

Building on a pilot deployment last winter of a Care Home Bed Tracker, Norfolk County Council are leading the development of a full system wide Bed Tracker primarily designed to aid in the demands during winter pressures, for the Norfolk and Waveney STP footprint.

The Bed Tracker prototype shows a full system wide view of the bed capacity and demand across the Norfolk and Waveney STP footprint through dashboards that can be available to all the key STP stakeholders to aid in managing bed pressures.  There is also a provider dashboard identifying the number of occupied beds, number of empty beds and the demand of patients currently not in beds at ward level, and organisation wide.  There are also filters available to view the information by quinary age bands, gender, ward type, ward classification and bed group.

The Bed Tracker prototype has been designed to take a bed state dataset from the NHS provider organisations on a 15-minute cycle, 24 hours, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of the year.  Via a secure file transfer process, the dataset is downloaded into Norfolk County Council’s award-winning data warehouse solution, GRID, to enable better business insights being key to delivering better decisions.     

Discovery evidence

The key objective of the project is to help local people with health and care needs to get access to available beds without unnecessary delays and to save local public-sector money in the process.

The Bed Tracker prototype has enabled the art of the possible to be shown and identified in terms of bed management tracking and analysis to the key Norfolk and Waveney STP stakeholders.  It has also raised hypothesis on the back off the information shown, in terms of areas of interest for future iterations – Home Care availability, Delayed Transfer of Care management and reporting, Performance Management, Bed Planning, Operational use within NHS providers etc.

As a result, the prototype needs to be developed based on these more detailed requirements and outcome deliverables into a fully deployed self-contained web application, and this will take a detailed programme of work to be put in place to ensure delivery.  This will not only require technical expertise and project/programme management but will also rely heavily on information governance resource to enable the enhancement of the currently reduced non-identifiable generic dataset into an identifiable one to enable the more patient/patient group specific outcomes to be delivered.