A quality improvement project with Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust for patients with interstitial lung diseases (ILD) Joint Working Project Executive Summary.
Delivery of a ‘best-practice’ based, optimal ILD shared care pathway protocol for patients with interstitial lung diseases (ILD) including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) across a local integrated NHS geography.
A collaborative joint-working project between Royal Papworth NHS Foundation Trust (RPH) and Boehringer Ingelheim Ltd (BIL).
Interstitial lung diseases (ILD) comprise a broad spectrum of conditions, all of which are characterised by inflammation or fibrosis of the lung with impairment of gas exchange. One of the commonest of these conditions is idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), which will be the primary focus for this pathway. Other ILDs will also be aligned with this pathway as a secondary objective.1
The NICE Quality standard for IPF specifies that services should be commissioned from and co-ordinated across all relevant organisations encompassing the whole IPF care pathway.2 A patient-centred, integrated approach to providing services is fundamental to delivering high-quality care to adults with IPF.2
RPH and BIL have designed this Joint Working project to deliver a best practice based, optimal ILD shared care pathway between specialist centre and Colchester Hospital. This approach will build specialist centre capacity enabling more patients to be seen and for care delivery to be closer to home. The project aims to reduce variation in access to optimal ILD diagnosis, treatment and ‘best practice’ patient management and reduce associated complications for patients.
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a significant impact on the clinical services at RPH with many appointments delayed or changed to virtual consultation. As a result, a more sustainable patient pathway needs to be found to provide specialist ILD care to patients from referring centres and “future proof” the specialist ILD service to be able to meet and adapt to growing demands, including improving the flow of patients through the current virtual multidisciplinary team meeting and creating a new virtual clinic.
The pilot project is anticipated to commence in September 2021, and will run for 12 months.
Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is one of the UK’s leading heart and lung hospitals, treating more than 100,000 patients each year. Boehringer Ingelheim Ltd is proud to be collaborating with RPH to design and deliver this quality improvement programme to fundamentally improve the health and quality of patients’ lives.
Outcome:
The project group co-created and developed a best practice ILD shared care pathway, incorporating insights from patients, clinicians, and other stakeholders. The pathway was shared and presented at the ILD Network Academy for Health Care Professionals. If you would like more information on outputs of phase 1, please contact MEDILDAcademy.GB@boehringer-ingelheim.com
This pathway has the opportunity to be a prototype for exemplar ILD care and support the development of similar clinical models around the country. The project team would like to work together on a phase 2, and fully develop and test this pathway as a proof of concept for a six-month period.
The second phase of the project will focus on developing the tools needed to implement the pathway, provide benchmarks for service delivery, and inform data generation on performance metrics and economic analysis.
References:
1. NHS England (2018). Schedule 2 Service Specification: Interstitial Lung Disease Adult. Available at: https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Interstitial-lung-disease-service-adult.pdf (Last accessed June 2021)
2. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (2015). Quality standard (QS79) Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis in Adults. Available at: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs79 (Last accessed June 2021)
NP-GB-103522 V2 March 2023