Hospital at home (virtual wards)

Hospital at home (also known as virtual wards) allows you or your family member to get the care they need at home safely and easily, rather than being in hospital.

Through the use of a personalised treatment plan and remote monitoring devices, if appropriate, hospital at home (virtual wards) can prevent hospital admissions or enable you or your family member to leave hospital sooner to continue your/their treatment at home. This frees up beds for those with more urgent health needs.

The hospital at home (virtual wards) that available to you or a family member may have different levels of face to face contact and offer different types of care and rehabilitation, with some being fully remote. Monitoring devices might include oxygen and blood pressure monitors, apps, telephone calls or video calls via iPads. These all help provide real-time information on a your or your family member's vital signs to a dedicated team of health and care professionals.

Frimley Health and Care has been developing these hospital at home (virtual wards) over a number of years for people experiencing a range of serious illnesses, including respiratory conditions, stroke, cancer, frailty or general urgent acute illness. We also have hospital at home (virtual wards) specially for children, orthopaedics and end of life care. More information will be supplied to you or your family member at point of referral onto the right hospital at home (virtual ward) for them.

Hospital at home (virtual wards) can improve the patient experience through:

• Reassurance: patients know they’re being monitored on an ongoing basis.
• Convenience and choice: patients can receive care and treatment at home, where they often prefer to be, rather than in a clinical setting.
• Wellbeing: research shows that being at home – where patients can see friends, family and pets, practice tasks in their own environment and sleep in their own bed – is much better for their physical health, mental wellbeing and overall recovery rate.

We also know that if people stay too long in hospital, they can experience serious deconditioning with reduction in muscle strength that affects their mobility, which can be hard to recover from. The hospital at home (virtual ward) approach enables patients to have all the benefits of home with the wraparound care of a dedicated clinical team reviewing them remotely and face-to-face when needed.

Another positive impact of this is that more patients maintain their independence and ability to remain in their own home and are less likely to need to be re-admitted to hospital.

As their main carer you are absolutely entitled to a say in whether your relative/friend moves across to a hospital at home (virtual ward). If you have provided your contact details, a member of the team will contact you to explain the process and what is involved. There is also a leaflet that should help you understand more about hospital at home (virtual wards). If you decide it is not suitable for you and your relative/friend then you have the option to decline.

The hospital at home (virtual ward) team will ensure that the person you care for has a personalised care plan that identifies what matters to them and ensures that the support they receive is designed and coordinated around their desired outcomes. Any additional care needed will be provided by the team whilst the person is on hospital at home (virtual ward).

Frimley Health and Care partners include a wide range of Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise organisations. Some of these may be familiar to you already. If not, we can link you into the right support services to make your caring responsibilities easier and help look after your personal wellbeing.

Every patient admitted to a hospital at home (virtual ward) will receive advance face-to-face training on how to use the wearable devices and technology in order to communicate with our team every day. This will include you as their carer, if you choose. Ongoing technical support is available, if required, but most patients in our test programmes have reported how easy it is to manage the equipment, take readings and how much they enjoy the regular interactions with our team.

The programme cannot offer this directly, however there are a number of schemes and sources of funding and support to help you with the cost of living, which we recognise is a matter of concern for many people.

Click this link to discover more about what help is available where you live.

If you should experience technical issues at any point, we are available to speak to by telephone and can make arrangements to visit you in person, should that be necessary.