Innovative care

08 Innovative Care

We will become more sustainable through continuous improvement and innovation in the care we provide for our patients. We are already leading the way on digitally enabled care and will continue focusing on ways to innovate patient-centred care, that is preventative and closer to home where possible.

Renal home therapies

The digital transformation of healthcare has accelerated during the Covid-19 crisis. We are making good progress on projects to transform our renal services, by encouraging post-transplant clinic patients to receive the majority of their outpatient care virtually and to increase the uptake of dialysis at home, rather than at our hospital sites.

The number of dialysis patients receiving renal home therapies has more than doubled from 7 per cent before the pandemic hit to 15 per cent. Building on the successful uptake of this programme, we will scale up this work over the next year. We aim to support up to 25 per cent of our dialysis patients to receive this therapy at home by April 2022.

Walking aids return and reuse scheme

In 2023, we launched our walking aids return and reuse scheme. Often, walking aids, like crutches, are not returned by patients after use. Tackling single-use culture in the NHS is crucial to working towards our net-zero goals.

Working with our physiotherapists, we have helped to create a return and reuse scheme, where patients can return their walking aids by placing them in them in designated bins at locations across St. Mary's, Charing Cross, and Hammersmith Hospitals.

Returning and reusing walking provide an excellent opportunity for reducing our impact on the environment due to the large amount of greenhouse gas emissions associated with aluminium manufacture. According to NHSE reusing a refurbished walking aid is on average 98 per cent lower in carbon emissions than using a new walking aid, and increasing the return rate over the next three years could reduce NHS carbon emissions by 7,400 tonnes of carbon emissions, equivalent to 281,397 car trips from London to Bristol. 

The scheme has been hugely successful, with over 400 walking aids collected from across the Trust so far. We have also secured funding from London Greener NHS Team and NHS London Procurement Partnership to help expand our scheme, with new and improved walking aid collection bins being rolled out across our three main sites.

Reducing single-use within physiotherapy

Physiotherapists in the musculoskeletal outpatient service at Charing Cross Hospital have teamed up with rehab engineers and the Rehabilitation Response Charity to reuse single-use orthopaedic walking boots, prosthetic limbs, hinged knee braces and cricket splints.

Used equipment in reasonable condition is sent to Pakistan for reuse thanks to the charity setup by consultant orthopaedic surgeon Mr Amjad Gulzar Shaika, who works in Essex. This circular economy approach to changing perspectives towards ‘waste’ and reusing valuable medical resources for people in need is an exemplar for the future.

The physiotherapy MSK outpatients department has also pioneered removing paper couch rolls. Nursing leaders and infection prevention and control leaders have determined that paper couch rolls offer no additional infection prevention if couches are cleaned before and after patient use. This has realised a paper (and tree) saving for the department of 20 rolls per month which also stops the equivalent of 75 beach balls of climate change gases from being emitted (75kg of Co2). If scaled across the Trust these savings could be significant.

Further reading and inspiration

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