Frameworks and funding: Setting up your virtual wards

It has been reported that NHS England is making a dynamic purchasing system its approved route to market for trusts buying equipment and systems to run virtual wards and remote monitoring programmes, and where this route is not taken, NHS organisations could risk losing access to central funding.

The HSJ reports that NHSE has selected the Spark DPS system, run by the Crown Commercial Service, as its approved means for trusts and integrated care systems to source their virtual ward solutions.

This comes ahead of mounting effort by organisations to expand their virtual ward offer and meeting NHSE’s central target of having 24,000 virtual ward ‘beds’ in place by December 2023.

Once a trust or ICS has secured the equipment and systems required to set up remote monitoring as part of their virtual wards, they will then need to join up their remote monitoring tools with task management, this enables organisations to create the reality of an operational virtual ward – basically a hospital-at-home bed – with the necessary care coordination of multidisciplinary teams to visit patients when needed.

Liaison Workforce’s Tasks solution, powered by Infinity, allows for effective task management for coordinated care based on data captured from the remote monitoring tools, adding the value for organisations, and increasing both the number of actual virtual beds in place and the pathways a trust can support in a virtual hospital bed at home.

This is an essential step in digitising task management for virtual wards, saving time and increasing capacity overall, reducing the risk of error, and also improving the staff experience.

Liaison Workforce can also provide guidance for accessing NHSE central funding and approved frameworks, giving end-to-end support for a virtual ward set up.