Chief Investigator: Dr Natalie Cox, NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer Geriatric Medicine, Academic Geriatric Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton

Team: Dr Stephen Lim, Principal Clinical Research Fellow, Academic Geriatric Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton & Honorary Consultant Geriatrician University Hospital Southampton NHS FT

Dr Sara McKelvie, NIHR Clinical Lecturer Primary Care Research, Primary Care Research Centre, Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton

Dr Carole Fogg, Senior Research Fellow, School of Health Sciences, University of Southampton

Start: 1 October 2024

End: 31 March 2026

Partners: Hampshire and Isle of Wight NHS Healthcare Foundation Trust, Isle of Wight NHS Trust, Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, University of Southampton

Background

Many older people within Hampshire and Isle of Wight (HIOW) live with several health conditions. These may suddenly worsen, requiring rapid assistance from healthcare professionals. Often it is best to provide this in the person’s own home, so urgent community-based services have expanded. Despite this, many older people attend hospital within HIOW. Some are discharged within 24 hours, indicating they too might be better managed at home. Therefore, increasing home support is a priority. To achieve this, we need to understand how urgent care services for older people are currently working.

Aim

To understand current use of urgent care services for older people in HIOW ICS, alongside factors that promote or hinder provision.

Objectives

1. To establish the priorities of key stakeholders.

2. To describe the attributes of older people who are discharged within 24 hours from hospitals, who are seen by specialist teams for older people early in their arrival.

3. To explore experiences of healthcare professionals and patients regarding urgent care services for older people.

4. To learn the type and amount of data routinely collected within urgent community-based care services for older people within HIOW and whether we can link this together, to understand care pathways older people may experience.

Design

We will initially conduct workshops to engage and discuss with key people who commission and plan healthcare, to identify the key regional priorities within the scope of the project.

We will use routinely collected information from the hospitals with urgent specialist services for older people and perform statistics to describe the service use and the types of patients supported by them. Working together with data analysts, we will scope out and report on the types of data collected by community services.

We will interview healthcare staff who refer into, or work within, the urgent services and patients who have used them. We will analyse the transcripts to give an account of their experiences of the services.

Patients and public

Members of the public have advised on the initial study outline and will be members of the study group. They will give input on study materials and interview questions and aid in interpreting results, as well as guiding the best ways to share our findings for a public audience.   

Dissemination

Our results will describe the older people aided by urgent community-based services and those attending hospital who might be managed at home. It will describe factors that promote or hinder support at home. We will share findings within the region, topublicisethe healthcare work in urgent care for older people. This will improve knowledge and aid in service design and delivery.