Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust
Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust plans to achieve WTD 2009 by separating acute (unplanned/unpredicted) care from planned care and introducing new non-complex planned and unplanned care pathways with rapid access to diagnostics and therapies to prevent admission.
Reconfiguring unscheduled/ scheduled services and training to achieve compliance.
These pathways will be managed by non medical practitioners, physiotherapists and pharmacists - working with physicians’ assistants and clinical assistant practitioners. They will have immediate access to senior medical advice and input and can complete tasks previously undertaken by junior doctors. These teams will refer on to complex care teams, led by senior doctors. Under this system, junior medical staff will be given training in non-complex planned and unplanned pathways in addition to exposure to emergency cases under close supervision. As they progress they will join the complex care teams and finally become senior members of the teams.
This pilot team based model of care provides enhanced roles, new roles with a planned career pathway for healthcare workers, all of which contributes to the target of WTD 2009 compliance.
Guys' and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust have won a HPMA 'Excellence in HR' award for their EWTD project which has been supported by Skills for Health - Workforce Projects Team as part of the EWTD 2009 pilot work. They won the 'Supporting Medical Staff' category, which recognises this project's contribution to medical training as their initiative had meant that more junior doctor time at their trust is spent in supervised training. The senior nurses also support the junior doctors, completing foundation programme competence assessments, and clinical assistant practitioners have freed up the juniors to spend more time on patient care.
Pilot duration: December 2006 - December 2008
Working Time Directive 2009 
