at home following a ground breaking fast-track surgery

MediHome, the Hospital-Care-At-Home company, cares for patients recovering from operations at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore. The NHS patients remain under the care of their RNOH consultant but return home within a few days of their operations, several days soomer than normal, to receive care from MediHome Nurses.

The patients prefer to be at home and there is widespread evidence from overseas that patients recover from operations like hip and knee joint replacements faster in their own homes.

MediHome has an Electronic Patient Record System (Evita) to further improve patient care and provide consultants and clinicians with up to the minute reports and access to images, i.e. wound sites.

Immediately following each patient visit our staff update the patient record. This means that we provide instant and up to date information accessible at any time of the day or night. Consultants can therefore access their patients' records using a web browser to conduct a Virtual Ward Round within minutes, without leaving their desk or home. Consultants can even use the system to provide us with further instructions or modify the treatment being provided.

Professor Sir Ara Darzi, the leading surgeon appointed by Gordon Brown as a new health minister, has just published a radical blueprint for the future of health care in London. The service provided by MediHome receives special mention as an exemplar of best practice recommended for adoption for the future.

Extract from the report:- "People want to be cared for at home, so the home should be seen as a location where care is given. Much planned care can be delivered at home including intravenous antibiotics and some cancer treatments. Better use should be made of specialist nurses to deliver high-quality care at home. In addition, much more can be done to support early discharge and rehabilitation. For instance MediHome and the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital have formed a partnership to allow patients to be discharged early and then cared for at home. Patients prefer it, there are cost savings and it is clinically safe."

MediHome is working with a number of NHS organisations in London including Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore, mentioned above, and Hounslow PCT. Professor Sir Ara Darzi and his team confirm that completing a patient's recovery at home provides many benefits including improving clinical outcomes and making best use of NHS resources. It is also the preference of the vast majority of patients.

Dr Mark Lomax, Managing Director and Founder of MediHome comments - "We very much welcome the report and its support for increasing the number of hospital patients receiving care at home. We are pleased to see case studies elsewhere in the report that describe acute home nursing as the way of the future. The work that MediHome is doing for Hounslow PCT and RNOH Stanmore demonstrates that this solution can be implemented today."