Research team
Tom Lawton, Michael McCooe, Ciarán McInerney
Collaborators
Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Why is this project important?
Considering safer decision in a digital world, simulation modelling can be used to safely test out scenarios and ideas to help alleviate unwanted circumstances like the pressures caused by winter spikes in admissions.
As patient-safety specialists, we are using state-of-the-art simulation techniques to improve our understanding of the antecedents of winter pressures and any potential mitigations.
What are we doing?
We are developing ways to build simulation models of patient flow using routinely-collected data, and demonstrating that these techniques can be applied to an entire hospital to model winter pressures. Modelling allows us to test even the strangest ideas without ever putting a patient at risk.
After extensive testing, we can work with patients and healthcare providers to translate our models into hospitals. We hope that this demonstrator project, in conjunction with the NHS-R community, will help increase the use of this technique in the NHS.
Outputs and Impact
- We have developed a computerised model of inpatient flow at Bradford Royal Infirmary and already predicted a big spike in demand in Bradford, earlier in 2019.
- We have published and initial description of the model and are preparing a more detailed description and evaluation.
- We have provided open-source R source code for our patient-flow model.
- We have provided tutorials to learn how to use and adapt our patient-flow models.
Contact for more information
If you have any questions about our Winter Pressures research, please contact Tom Lawton or on social media at @LawtonTri.