Salford Royal Hospital wins Innovation Award for their work with bleeding on the brain

SALFORD Royal hospital has won one of only 22 innovation awards for their work on improving care for people with bleeding in the brain.

Stroke specialists at Salford Royal, led by Honorary Consultant Neurologist Adrian Parry-Jones, have been awarded £75,000 by independent health care charity The Health Foundation as part of its £1.5million Innovating for Improvement Programme.

In the UK, roughly 150,000 people have a stroke per year; one in ten of those are due to bleeding in the brain (intracerebral haemorrhage or ICH). ICH is fatal in nearly 50% of cases, and survivors often have physical or cognitive (memory) problems.

Stroke expert Dr Parry -Jones explains: “Intracerebral haemorrhage can be absolutely devastating but we know that specialist care, given as quickly as possible, can improve survival and recovery. We hope our project will mean a much better outlook for patients and their families.”

This award will help support the Acute Bundle of Care for Intracerebral Haemorrhage (ABC-ICH) project which aims to reduce the percentage of patients dying or left severely disabled six months after suffering bleeding on the brain.

Simple as ABC

The ABC-ICH project includes:

• An anti-coagulation reversal – reversal of any blood thinning drugs in patients within 90 minutes
• B blood pressure lowering within six hours of patients first showing symptoms
• C care pathway – a detailed analysis of local data to make sure patients get timely access to neurosurgery and neurocritical care at the Greater Manchester Neurosciences Centre, based at Salford Royal.

The project will be supported by an app for healthcare professionals to use at the bedside, which will enable them to input live data and ensure close monitoring.

Work on the project will start in January 2017, with the ABC bundle being introduced at Fairfield and Stepping Hill hospitals from April 2017.

The Future

Sarah Henderson, Associate Director from the Health Foundation, said: “We are very excited to be working with such a high-calibre of teams, who all have great innovative ideas. As an organisation we are keen to support innovation at the frontline across all sectors of health and care services, and I am pleased that we will be able to support these ambitious teams to develop and test their ideas over the next year.”

Effective prevention of recurrent ICH is a key research goal. ICH is usually due to disease of small blood vessels damaged by high blood pressure. The Healthcare App collects data on key processes and links it to a dashboard so teams at each centre can see their own data at fortnightly meetings which allows them to track their progress, identify possible improvements and test the impact of those changes in future patients.

By Sapphire Beamish