Discharge Coordination
Delayed discharge costs the NHS billions and harms patients. The bottleneck is rarely clinical — it is coordination. CAREFUL makes the discharge plan visible, shared and trackable across every team involved.
The problem
Discharge requires actions from multiple teams: pharmacy, therapy, social care, transport, the ward, the GP. Each team works in its own system. The ward coordinator spends hours on the phone chasing progress. The patient waits. The bed stays blocked.
How CAREFUL solves it
CAREFUL creates a single, shared discharge plan. Every action required for discharge — medication reconciliation, therapy assessment, social care referral, transport booking — is assigned to a named person, visible to all teams and trackable in real time.
Organisational statuses show where the patient is in their journey: "awaiting pharmacy", "ready for discharge", "transport booked". Any team member can update the status. Flow coordinators see the whole picture without making a single phone call.
Because CAREFUL works across organisational boundaries, the discharge plan can extend beyond the hospital — to community teams, GPs and care homes.
Results
At Withybush, the combination of structured actions and real-time visibility contributed to a 50% reduction in patients waiting in ED — a direct consequence of improved patient flow and faster discharge from downstream wards.