RESEARCHERS in the South West have developed an important new tool to ensure health trusts maintain sufficient levels of life-saving equipment and bed spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The University of Exeter and NIHR Applied Research Collaboration South West Peninsula (PenARC) team have created the tool which helps accurately predict the demand on NHS resources.
Forecasts from the data modelling tool have been used to forward plan the demand for in-patient beds, intensive care, PPE, ventilators, oxygen and testing kits.
Crucially, it has also incorporated not only predicted hospital staffing requirements, but also the levels of staff that may be off-duty due to illness and self-isolation.
Decisions within healthcare trusts need to be made quickly amid circumstances that change from day to day and even hour to hour.
The team of data scientists and health professionals have been working together to produce high quality models and data to aid this quick decision making.
Angela Hibbard, Director of Finance and Performance at North Devon Healthcare Trust and also representing the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, has been leading the project for the local NHS. She described the tool as ’being hugely important in informing the decision-making within both Trusts during the COVID-19 crisis’.
’It has helped us make well informed and evidence-based decisions across a range of key issues such as PPE and ventilators being available to frontline staff when they need them,’ she said.
’More importantly it is helping us model scenarios as we start to come out of lockdown and what this may mean to our hospital capacity requirements going forward.’
The research team behind the tool itself is led by the University of Exeter’s Professor Gavin Shaddick and includes members of NIHR Applied Research Collaboration South West Peninsula (PenARC).