Golden Jubilee National Hospital's Seven Day Service makes positive impact on patient outcomes

A pioneering Seven Day Service implemented by the Golden Jubilee National Hospital’s Rehabilitation Department has celebrated its one year anniversary of making a positive impact on patient outcomes.

The Golden Jubilee’s Rehabilitation Department became one of the first in Scotland to roll out their Seven Day Service in January 2014, after two years of extensive work with staff and multi-disciplinary teams within the hospital to ensure that every patient received equality of care, regardless of the time or day of their admission.

Rehabilitation Manager, Christine Divers, explained:

We are committed to ensuring patients are able to access and benefit from therapy as soon as possible after their surgery. This allows us to optimise recovery times and hospital stays.

To achieve this it was essential that we were able to deliver the same standard of care for every one of our patients, regardless of when they were admitted to hospital or had surgery. Introducing Seven Day Working has been challenging, but it has been more than worth it to ensure that over the past year we have put in place a sustainable model that offers not only the highest possible standard of care, but equality of care for all of our patients across the Board.

We are now one year into the programme. and so far it has been going very well. Our team have adapted to the change fantastically and have demonstrated an incredible can do attitude; without their efforts, this wouldn’t have been possible.

The Golden Jubilee National Hospital is home to the regional and national heart and lung services for the NHS in Scotland, as well as one of the largest orthopaedic centres in Europe, carrying out specialist and complex procedures on a wide variety of patients on a daily basis.

This initiative has been incredibly successful, winning two poster competitions dedicated to highlighting best practice in healthcare for its benefits to patients and effective processes. The awards came from the Quality and Efficiency Support Team (QuEST): Improving patient flow in Scotland event and the College of Occupational Therapists Specialist Section Trauma and Orthopaedics (COTSSTO) National Conference poster competitions.

Jill Young, Chief Executive of the Golden Jubilee, commented:

As a national resource, we are dedicated to leading quality, research and innovation for NHSScotland and are continually looking for new ways to evolve and develop the service, improving our standard of patient care and make sure we are getting it right for every patient, every time.

We are extremely proud of the Rehabilitation team for leading the way in Seven Day Working and for sharing their expertise in developing a sustainable and effective service which is so different to traditional working patterns. Winning first place in two prestigious poster competitions is testament to their hard work and evidence of the quality of service that has been introduced.

Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing, Shona Robison MSP, also commented on the service, saying:

I welcome this additional service on offer at the Golden Jubilee’s rehabilitation department, which is a good example of a health board introducing additional services at weekends that make a real difference to patients.

This is consistent with the approach we are taking through the Sustainability and Seven Day Services Taskforce which is about making the best use of our resources but also looking at new and innovative ways to improve the care patients receive across the week.