Improving outcomes and reducing costs: how we’re collaborating with Fosse Healthcare

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We’re excited to announce our new exciting partnership to demonstrate how home care can improve outcomes and reduce care costs for the NHS.

Birdie is working with Nottinghamshire City Council, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire CCG, and Fosse Healthcare to develop tools that allow care workers to track and report early warning signs of health risks.

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This innovative new project means Fosse's home care staff will be trained to become the eyes and ears for NHS clinicians and identify early warning signs for their home care clients’ health risks. Using Fosse's care management platform and the Birdie home care app, home care workers will have an easy-to-use interface to record their observations digitally. 

Drawing on established clinical guidelines for early warning signs [RESTORE2], they will check for soft signs that a care recipient's health is at risk. Care workers can take key clinical measures such as blood pressure [NEWS2] and share this information with local GPs using an established clinical communication tool [SBARD]. Care staff can do these steps through the Birdie App whilst the care worker is visiting a person. 

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This will enable health risks to be identified earlier and allow for a clinical response to be made sooner. In turn, this will mean better outcomes for care recipients, reduce pressure on Nottinghamshire's clinical services, and help people live at home happier, independently, for longer.

The project will contribute to national and local priorities to integrate care between NHS and social care, move care out of hospitals in the community, and keep people at home for longer. It aims to facilitate a more seamless care pathway and transparency between primary and social care and beyond and reduce 'revolving door' patients.

It will also open up additional development and career approaches for home care workers, an area of traditionally challenging recruitment and retention.

This Better Care Fund proof of concept project will run for six months in Newark, Nottinghamshire, with an accompanying evaluation to identify and share learnings. 

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The project is part of Birdie’s broader ambition to identify opportunities for home care to monitor healthcare-related conditions and expand the contribution home care can make to NHS primary and community care. It also aims to enable people to receive better, more joined-up care in their own homes and improve the speed at which care providers can respond to concerns. 

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Learn more about the project here.

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