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Patient Pathways
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Last modified date:7 February 2007
What is a patient pathway?
The "patient pathway"
is the route that a patient will take from their first contact with an NHS member of staff (usually their GP), through referral, to the completion of their treatment. It also covers the period from entry into a hospital or a Treatment Centre, until the patient leaves. You can think of it as a timeline, on which every event relating to treatment can be entered. Events such as consultations, diagnosis, treatment, medication, diet, assessment, teaching and preparing for discharge from the hospital can all be mapped on this timeline.
The pathway gives an outline of what is likely to happen on the patient's journey and can be used both for patient information and for planning services as a template pathway can be created for common services and operations.
Patient pathways in Treatment Centres
Treatment Centres have been designed around patient pathways. Many have used this as their starting point in the layout within the centre, minimising the disruption to the patient during their stay within the Treatment Centre, allowing the patient to move from one point in the process to the next with ease.
Treatment Centres are working in partnership with acute Trusts, Primary Care Trusts, ambulance Trusts, social services and patient representatives across local health economies to build new treatment pathways around the individual needs of NHS patients, from the patient's point of entry into the system.
In Goole, average lengths of stay in orthopaedics have reduced from 12 days to 5½ days for major hip operations and 6.2 days for knee operations as a result of new pre-operative assessment processes (including rehabilitation advice and liaison with community equipment services) followed by use of step-down intermediate care services to support direct discharge to the patient's home.
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