Blue Ribbon Patients: A Tool to Protect from Unnecessary Transitions

by Rick Strang (@rickstrang)Bed pressures in busy hospitals often means that less acute patients are moved to different wards in order to make space for patients admitted from the emergency department. We are often faced with some difficult decisions in our current NHS. End of Life (EoL) patients seem particularly at risk of being moved, which can be very distressing for families, friends, the patient and the care teams. It is also quite common for these moves to occur into the night or at weekends. These periods are covered by site managers, bed managers, and on-call clinicians rather than the usual ward teams and therefore their knowledge of the patients can be very limited. Indeed, they will often require sitting down and reading through the notes before making decisions. This is where we thought we may be able to have an impact by flagging clearly those patients whom we should not move. The Blue Ribbon Patient sticker idea came out of that.The scheme is not exclusive to EoL patients, although it predominantly affects them and was started particularly for them. For example, we had an elderly man who had been profoundly deaf since childhood with several other very complex needs on one of the wards. As he became better he was likely to get moved. However, some of the staff had learned to sign and he had built up an important trusting relationship. Moving him and starting again wasn ’t going to be helpful so he was made a Blue Ribbon patient.It is vitally important that “...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: actively dying death/dying England hospital strang transition Source Type: blogs