We have been progressing a range of actions contributing to urgent and emergency care priorities in NHS Wales. These include:
Care of older people: We have put forward a proposal that will ensure we meet the workforce planning, demand and capacity modelling requirements of the Older people and people living with frailty statement. We propose to establish a ‘Future Care Planning Task and Finish Group’ to review (and where necessary develop) the training and education of our health and care workforce. This will ensure we have the appropriate numbers of professionals to provide the care needed.
111 Mental Health Practitioners: Work is progressing to develop a competency and career framework for Mental Health Practitioners working in 111 ‘press 2’. This is aligned to our Strategic Workforce Plans for Mental Health and Primary Care and aims to improve retention by providing a career path. The majority of the workforce are non-registrants or with lived experience.
Urgent Care Practitioner Competency Framework: We have developed the All-Wales Urgent Care Practitioner Competency Framework to support learning, supplement clinical skills and enable consistency of competencies across multi-disciplinary teams. It is specifically designed for use within urgent primary care centres and out of hours settings. The Framework will be piloted and evaluated during 2024/25 to demonstrate impact before being widely implemented.
Reducing pathway of care delays: We’ve developed a Trusted Assessor toolkit to support reducing pathway of care delays. This includes national guidance, a competency matrix, signposting to educational resources and case studies. Since the launch of the toolkit, the number of Trusted Assessor functions / posts supporting hospital discharge has risen from 144 to 254 (an increase of 76%). Work is ongoing to further embed the use of the toolkit.
Further information is in our August board papers from page 205.