Inside the ‘magical’ West Midlands health hub hailed a model for the whole country

NHS England visited East Birmingham Locality Hub, based at Washwood Heath Health and Wellbeing Centre, Clodeshall Road, Saltley, and were full of praise for the services offered with chair Richard Meddings saying “It’s a great model for the whole country”.

And the centre is proving to be a hit for patients too who said this is the “set up that has been missing” from the NHS.

The Hub is part of Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care System’s Community Care Collaborative and offers services including ultrasound scans, X-rays, lung function tests and blood tests for people living in the east of the city.

It has also recently unveiled its Respiratory Same Day Emergency Care service – the first of its kind in Birmingham – for people aged 18 or over who are referred by GPs with an illness not deemed critically unwell.

Since it’s full launch around six weeks ago, around 400 patients, who would have gone to an hospital emergency department, have been treated at Washwood Heath.

One of those, 66-year-old Brenda Clayson from Solihull, said: “I was called in here because I keep having continuous lung infections.

“They are not everyday infections and, unfortunately, my GP doesn’t know about respiratory to the extent the unit would.

“Dr Alein Hal Helou (respiratory consultant) is just so wonderful. I’m really happy and very pleased.

“I have to say, when I came I thought ‘the NHS is strapped for cash so they’ve re-purposed an old library’. I was amazed when I came. It is state-of-the-art.

“These satellite units are probably the way forward – my GPs are excellent but they can only do what they can do.

“This kind of set up has been missing because it’s GP or straight to hospital and this is an intermediary which is excellent.”

Medics at the Hub said if people need hospital treatment then they would still have access to it but the centre was about reducing long waiting times and ambulance delays and helping people get the treatment they need as soon as possible.

Dr Rifat Rashid, Hospital Executive Director at Heartlands Hospital, said: “We have worked collaboratively with our external partners to come up with a way of delivering care for patients closer to their home.

“Looking after the patients needs in a setting, delivering same day emergency care, hoping to avoid patients having to sit in queues in either ambulances or departments and to get that first class service they deserve.

“But it’s not just about the same day care but also what can we do to prevent people falling ill in the first place.

“So, we’re working very closely with our primary care colleagues, essentially wrapping care around patients in a way that allows us to look after them preventatively.

“Hopefully that will help us achieve in the long term less ambulance delays in the hospitals if and when we get it up to full capacity.”

Lorraine Galligan, chief of nursing for Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Trust, said: “We see it as a blue print for what the NHS could look like and should look like in the future.

“Local people will be able to access healthcare in a timely and effective way so they don’t need to go to big hospitals to get access to care.

“When you see it, it’s like something magical happening between the different parts of the NHS coming together and putting the patient truly at the centre of what they need which is really good.

“No one wants to sit in ED for 20 hours to be assessed when actually you can be assessed much more closer to home and get the care you need today rather than in three or four days time.

“In the same way, when you are admitted to hospital, no-one wants to be there longer than they have to be. If the opportunity to be at home and still get good oversight and care is there, then that is what the community tell us they want.”

And Robbie Dedi, the Trust’s chief medical officer, added: “We’ve concentrated on patients who largely use our acute services, our hospitals, more frequently and tried to support them.

“We’ve reorganised our services to wrap around those patients and provide more support so they are less likely to need acute care.

“What we’re also doing working with primary care, social care and other organisations is try to identify what we can do to prevent them having to need acute care and that is a key bit here.

“Of course, it doesn’t remove the fact some people do need hospitals and that is clear and that will always be needed.

“What we’re trying to do is those who need acute care in a timely way and those who don’t need it are managed in a different way.”