Respiratory Virtual Ward

• Does your patient have pneumonia?
• Does your patient have a exacerbation of COPD?
• Can they be stepped down but still need support?

Virtual wards/ hospitals at home means the patient can get home earlier from hospital and back to the comfort of their own home or remain at home without needing to be admitted to hospital.

• Once the patient is on the virtual ward/ hospital at home, they will be called within 24hours by one of our tele-health team.
• The tele-health team will monitor the patient over the next 7 days (or more ) to check they are improving as expected.
• The community respiratory team will contact the patient every day, either by visit to their home or a telephone call, to review the patients progress.

The patient will also be discussed in the virtual ward MDT with a consultant.

So the teams can give the patient safe care, they will be able to access the patients medical notes and share information about their care with the GP.

Monitoring

• Each day the patient will need to let the tele-health team know their readings via the monitor

If they don’t hear from the patient, they will ring to check on them to find out why they haven’t completed a reading that morning.

• The patient will be monitored by the Mersey Care tele-health team from 08.00am to 8.00pm,  7 days a week
• The community respiratory teams will also be Available alongside the tele-health team however they have different working hours depending what team the patient is under
• The patient will be given instructions on what to do if they are feeling unwell and will have contact numbers for their community respiratory team
• When everyone is happy and the patient is well enough, the patient will be discharged from the virtual ward

Think your patient may meet criteria? Contact the respiratory nurses.

Tel: Ext 5162 - Careflow referral