About Avoiding Hospital Admissions (ITHAcA) HIT
This means the HIT is no longer active
Background
The Avoiding Hospital Admissions Health Integration Team (ITHAcA HIT) aims to reduce avoidable hospital admissions across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire. The term ‘avoidable admission’ refers to where an individual could have been managed safely in the community by primary care but was instead admitted to hospital. The reasons behind why this may be happening are a key focus for the ITHAcA HIT.
The cost to the country of hospital admissions that could have been avoided is substantial, as emergency admissions represent around two-thirds of all hospital bed days in England. In 2012/2013, 34 million bed days and over 5 million emergency admissions were recorded (HES, 2013), of which more than 1 million could have been avoided.
Aims and objectives
ITHAcA aims to reduce complexity in the local urgent care system and to optimise the productivity and efficiency of existing and new interventions. The HIT has three work streams:
- Avoidable admissions (focusing on children with respiratory conditions, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and dementia)
- Managing risk in primary and secondary care
- Using data to inform commissioning
Who’s involved
The HIT leadership team is comprised of leading clinicians and experts from across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucester. Sarah Purdy, Associate Dean, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Bristol and Peter Goyder, Urgent Care Clinical Lead at Bristol Clinical Commissioning Group are the lead directors for ITHAcA.
Other members of the leadership team include: Jonathan Benger, Peter Brindle and James Calvert.
Find out more about who’s involved in ITHAcA.
HIT involvement and engagement activities
In order to ensure our work is in line with patient and public expectations and useful to commissioners and service providers, we have developed two cross cutting themes.
Knowledge mobilisation (KM)
This HIT activity is led by Helen Baxter. The knowledge mobilisation activities that ITHAcA is currently involved with are:
- An ‘information repository’
- Discussion working groups (DWGs)
- ITHAcA presentations
Find out more about ITHAcA’s knowledge mobilisation work.
Patient and public involvement (PPI)
Melanie Chalder leads the PPI work of the HIT, and the PPI strategy will be published soon.
Contacts
To find out more, please contact:
- Helen Baxter: [email protected] or 0117 331 0748
ITHAcA at the HIT conference
ITHAcA presented this poster (PDF) at
the 2018 Bristol Health Partners Health Integration Team Conference.
