Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust is seeking a Community Falls Pick Up Service to respond to falls and related injuries in the community, supporting ambulance services and prioritizing higher acuity patients.
SWBH - Community Falls Pick Up Service. Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust (SWBH) (the "Authority") is issuing this invitation to tender ("ITT") in connection with the competitive procurement for a Community Falls Pick Up Service.
Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust (the Authority) is an integrated care organisation dedicated to improving the lives of local people.
We employ over 7,000 people and spend around £430m of public money, largely drawn from our local Clinical Commissioning Group. That Group and this Trust is responsible for the care of 530,000 local people from across North-West Birmingham and all the towns within Sandwell.
The requirement is for a Community Falls Pick Up Service. Falls and related injuries are increasingly common, and an important driver of demand for urgent and emergency care. They can negatively affect functional independence and quality of life and, when resulting in a lie of several hours in length, are also strongly associated with serious injuries, admission to hospital, and subsequent moves into long term care.
Not all falls result in serious injury, and a proportion of falls can be responded to by community-based response services (with clinical responsibility remaining with UCR Service) supporting NHS statutory services such as ambulance services to prioritise higher acuity patients.
Level one and two falls (as described by the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE) Falls response governance framework for NHS ambulance trusts) can often be managed by community-based falls response services following clinical triage and assessment of the person who has fallen, and ongoing support to the community-based responder service for escalation, onward referral or discharge as appropriate.