Developing The Escalation Management System With The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust

Within the NHS there are a series of frameworks which drive the compliance reporting to ensure that hospitals, Trusts and affiliate organisations are aligned in ways in which they manage capacity, incidents and patient care throughput. One of these frameworks in place is the OPEL or Operational Pressures Escalation Levels framework, which is used to set out the procedures to effectively manage day to day variations in demand across the health and social care system within a NHS hospital, Trust or affiliate organisation.

The Curve has partnered up with The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust (TRFT) over the past year to explore and develop a bespoke management and reporting tool that aims to increase efficiency and patient care, especially in high demand and heavy workload scenarios. The Escalation Management System is a software application used to calculate these OPEL levels for an organisation typically at hospital or Trust level. The application is deployed as a web application, built using existing NHS interface tools in order to provide a high level of familiarity for the NHS staff that would be using this system on a daily basis.

The Escalation Management System has been designed and developed to ensure operational NHS staff and users requiring access to the system can do so and utilise its potential on a wide range of devices such as phones, laptops, tablets and more. This was one of the key aspects highlighted early on in the development cycle as being an important feature, due to the fast paced environment many Hospitals and Trusts experience and therefore the need for having a system which could be used wherever staff were was crucial.