University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) has been chosen for a national flagship programme after devising a "patient diary" that aims to put patients at the centre of their care planning.

The Trust has been included in the Health Foundation’s new £4.6 million Shared Purpose programme to develop new ideas on how corporate support services and clinical teams can work together to improve the quality of care.

UHB is one of nine organisations that will each receive funding of £420,000 over three and a half years to develop and test their ideas with the aim of building an evidence base that can benefit the NHS as a whole.

The UHB project, entitled "Diarising the Inpatient Journey", will centre on a typical diary which is expected to contain dates and times of all the key events that are planned for an individual patient’s stay. As well as listing patient appointments, the diary is also likely to illustrate the ward routine, detailing things such as meal times, visiting times and consultant ward rounds.

It is anticipated that the first prototype diaries will be ready for testing by the middle of next year once the design has been finalised with the help of input from patients and staff.

Lorraine Simmonds, Head of Service Improvement, said: “We are really excited about this project. Co-ordinating clinical and corporate services in this way is really innovative. It will put patients right at the centre of their care planning in a way that’s never been achieved before.”

The aim is for interventions to be coordinated and structured around the patient's day, thereby improving patient experience, reducing length of stay and managing resources more efficiently.

At present, inpatients may be told their anticipated discharge date on admission but no system exists that produces a full schedule of planned interventions, such as diagnostics, operative procedures and physiotherapy, for a patient’s stay.

Using the diary as a starting point for discussion, nurses will engage with patients and carers daily to help manage expectations and empower patients to discuss their care and challenge anything that they feel may have been overlooked.

By implementing inpatient diaries with ward and patient views in this way, the team aims to have a positive impact on length of stay and timeliness of interventions – improving the patient experience, service productivity and resource management.

Shared Purpose aims to raise awareness of the role corporate support services can play in improving quality of care, to create examples of best practice and to develop the evidence base of what works in improving care.

Penny Pereira, Assistant Director at the Health Foundation, said: “One of the reasons we wanted to work in this area is because, to date, the quality agenda has largely focused on improving the reliability of clinical services. But clinical teams do not work in isolation. Corporate services have often been overlooked, but we know that they have a significant role to play in improving the quality of care experienced by patients.

“Developing support systems that will enable high quality care is essential to move beyond improvement at clinical team level to sustainable organisation and system-wide transformation. The current financial challenges facing the UK’s health services make it even more critical that providers are able to successfully deliver major changes that often require corporate as well as clinical change.

“We are excited to be working with these nine organisations and their project teams on our Shared Purpose programme. The successful projects are all seeking to achieve goals that are in some way transformational. And it’s not just the level of ambition that marked out the teams chosen through our highly competitive process – they have particularly strong executive engagement and evaluation approaches, giving us confidence they will be able to deliver the changes they are embarking upon.”

In addition to the £420,000 package, the project teams will also be supported with a development programme with access to experts and advice to help the organisations work on their ideas and evaluate them.

The other project teams are based at Kings College Hospital, Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Airedale Foundation Trust, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust, University College London Hospitals, Oxford University Hospital, and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

Further information about the Shared Purpose programme is available on the Health Foundation website.