Having delivered life-changing outcomes to patients for years, Hunters Moor is now expanding its scope even further with the addition of specialist spinal cord injury and tracheostomy care.
NR Times learns more about the centre, its service expansion, and ongoing investment and development work to ensure its team can deliver the best possible care to patients
A long-established neuro-rehabilitation service is broadening its specialism even further through the addition of dedicated spinal cord injury and tracheostomy care.
Hunters Moor has a strong reputation for its support of people with brain injury and neurological conditions, with intensive neuro-rehab programmes devised by the in-house multi-disciplinary team helping to deliver outcomes for patients well beyond expectations.
And now, as the Level 2 neuro-rehab centre in Birmingham – owned by Active Care Group – continues to invest in its facilities and staff to ensure it offers the best possible service to clients, it is delivering the required training to enable it to provide support to patients with SCI and with tracheostomy needs.
Since the appointment of Dr Khuram Waheed last year, an in-house specialist doctor with a background in rehabilitation medicine, Hunters Moor has seen strong progress, with new levels of development and support available to staff and a host of new procedures around best practice introduced.
Statistics show that, in the past year, the work of the centre and its team has helped to reduce hospital admissions by 76 per cent.
And with the demand-led addition of dedicated SCI and tracheostomy services – and beds currently available to accommodate these patients – Hunters Moor is also looking at the potential to use existing unoccupied space as a care setting, further supporting the NHS in taking patients out of frontline care and into a specialist neuro-rehab environment.
“The patients are the cornerstone of Hunters Moor and we are all dedicated to providing them with the best possible levels of care,” said Dr Waheed.
“Since I have come here, we have made many changes to help make that the best it can be, our staff are more able to communicate and work together and there is a very good set up for our patients. We want to make Hunters Moor the best it can be and we are all working to achieve that.”
Growing levels of specialist neuro-rehab support
Hunters Moor has built a reputation over many years as a key site in delivering neuro-rehab, with patients from a wide geographical radius across the midlands and surrounding areas – moving to the 42-bed centre for its specialist support.
With a specialism in brain injury work, Hunters Moor’s MDT also cover the full spectrum of neurological conditions and illnesses, achieving often life-changing outcomes for patients during their time at the centre, which is usually for a minimum of 12 weeks.
Now, with the addition of dedicated SCI and tracheostomy care, it can support even more people.
“We are known for our work in acquired brain injury and traumatic brain injuries, as well as progressive neurological conditions. But through the extensive training we have undertaken to broaden our offering, we are now advancing into spinal and tracheostomy patients,” said Dr Waheed.
“Our nursing teams have undergone extensive training and we are now ready to accept new patients who need our specialist care.”
Lisa Mullineux, business development manager at Active Care Group, said: “Our development of the spinal and tracheostomy care pathways at Hunters Moor are as a direct result of referral demand.
“We are pleased to have been able to harness the expertise we have within our wider group, and well-established care in the home division, to support all of our staff in specialist training for spinal and tracheostomy care to enable us to offer our services to these patient groups.
“It’s a really exciting time for us at Hunters Moor, our hope is this offering will allow for more local people to remain as close to home as possible having their specialist care needs met in an expert therapeutic environment .
“We are working with our commissioning partners to explore opportunities to develop additional residential step down provision for those patients who have ongoing needs requiring skilled clinical oversight and transitional living settings before they can safely be supported in the community.
“Such an approach will enable cost savings to the public purse, progressive pathways and partnership working, which we are looking forward to exploring further.”
The developments at Hunters Moor come after years of successfully supporting patients to achieve and surpass their outcome expectations.
“Each of the patients we are privileged to work with at Hunters Moor is individual and their rehab journey is their own for some, their needs will be met within three weeks, for others that may take 12 weeks, and for others that road will be longer. This is an intense period of neuro-rehabilitation, and as we work towards discharge, it is the responsibility of us all to ensure this is safe,” said Dr Waheed.
“The two things we focus on from the outset are maximising quality of life and reducing the care burden, while promoting independence as much as possible.
“We work very closely with everyone involved in discharge planning and what that is going to look like, to ensure our support goes right up until the point of discharge. We are absolutely committed to doing the best at every point whilst our patients are with us, we are proud to have assisted our patients to have achieved some really, really good outcomes.”
One recent example is from a man who arrived with a hypoxic brain injury after an insulin overdose. He arrived in a prolonged disorder of consciousness (PDoc) with minimal expectations for his progress.
“This gentleman was with us for several months and we were seeing glimmers of change in his presentation. We worked with his responsible commissioner to extend his stay as we were seeing the progress and wanted to maximise his opportunity for that,” recalls Dr Waheed.
“He arrived here with a need for one-to-one care 24 hours a day, to being discharged to a nursing home with a reduced care burden and no longer needing one-to-one support.
“You can imagine the cost saving to the NHS when funding a placement for a patient in a nursing home with the needs this gentleman arrived with, compared with when he left us.
“Aside from the financial benefit and most importantly the positive impact this has on the patient is enormous We were all very pleased with the outcome for him, and the progress he made during his time at Hunters Moor.”
‘We want to be the best we can be’
Keen to continue to build and develop the reputation it has for the quality of its neuro-rehab, Hunters Moor is always looking for opportunities to improve its ways of operating to maximise the care it can deliver to patients.
In the past year in particular, since the arrival of Dr Waheed, a raft of major changes have been made in the centre, supporting its staff with new processes and training to enable them to deliver the highest standards of care.
The closer working between the therapy teams and nursing teams, with Dr Waheed at the centre of the link, has given rise to a number of other measures.
“We have weekly electronic ward rounds, each plan for patients is updated for our nursing and therapy staff to follow. We have a new admissions policy, which can be done electronically too, so everything can be found digitally,” says Dr Waheed.
“I am in charge of heading up the MDT meetings, and we also have new levels of medicines management training and emergency drills. We’ve had specific training in a range of areas and I give educational lectures on staff training as well. Maintaining patient safety is the absolute priority.”
Dr Waheed provides a consistent point of contact and support, working with colleagues around the clock to deliver the best possible service to clients.
“Because we know our patients so well, we can identify issues and intervene at the earliest opportunities. If I or one of my clinical colleagues are contacted at any time of night or day, as well as providing reassurance to the team, our patients and family members, this can very often avoid long delays in sourcing external support, whether that be through NHS 111 or a GP service,” he says.
“Because we have very complex patients with brain injury or progressive neurological conditions, any change in them can have a massive change on their outcome. Unless we pick up the signs early, it could potentially have life-threatening complications.
“There is that security for our staff of knowing they will always be speaking to someone who knows the patients and their specific circumstances and needs. That reassurance can make them feel more confident in their roles, and that is a theme which has run throughout our regular staff and also our agency nurses.
“There was one gentleman who had a cranioplasty and came to us from hospital after having that done. Within two days he developed a swelling and if no-one was there to recognise it, he could even have died. But within two hours, our staff had recognised the problem, spoken to me, and organised a transfer to hospital under his neurosurgeon, who I spoke to on the phone, and the patient was stated on antibiotics.
“That probably did save his life, and that is why I and the team invest the time we do in getting to know our patients, their conditions, their history and their needs.”
