Acuterespiratory infection (ARI) hubs implementation

With more patients and fewer health professionals, access to health care is difficult. We need to improve access to urgent care in the community. Local hubs could offer prompt assessment and joined-up care. This is especially important for patients with acute respiratory infections, such as chest infections.

Currently, about10hubs are being set up in England for patients with acute respiratory infections. Each hub is created depending on local needs. Teams of professionals with
SPCR FR 6-IV application form Page 3of 16TheSchool for Primary Care Research is a partnership between the Universities of Bristol, Exeter, Keele, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, QMUL, Southampton and UCL and is part of the National Institute for Health and Care Research. different expertise, including doctors, nurses and other clinicians ,and quick tests will help assess and manage patients.

This is a good time to study how these new services are set up and how they work to improve patient care. This project aims to identify and describe how different hubs are setup, and how they work to help patients with respiratory infections. This will help us learn how hubs might work better in the future. It will also help us plan a larger study to see if the hubs improve patient care. We will interview about 30 professionals by telephone or video calls. We will select professionals from different hubs and in different roles. We will include those people setting up and running the hubs, and those caring for patients in the hubs. We will ask professionals about:

• how they set up the hub and how it works
• how they care for patients and what treatments they offer
• how new technologies help with diagnosis and care
• what helped them or made their work more difficult
• how they worked in new teams with other professionals
• suggestions on improving the service in the future

We will record the conversations and write down what people said. We will ask the professionals for any documents that may help us understand how the hubs work. We will use several ways to rapidly analyse the data to identify the main findings. For example, we will create topic lists and detailed summaries.

A Patient/Public Involvement group will contribute from the start. Patient/public contributors will make sure that we ask important and useful questions which are important to patients. They will help understand the findings and what they mean to patients. They will advise how to communicate the findings to the public and plan a follow-on study.

We will promptly share the findings to inform health service planning for Winter 2023. We will organise an online meeting and invite the professionals we have spoken to, patient/public contributors, and other people who might find the findings useful (such as NHS decision-makers). We will seek agreement on the lessons which can be learnt from the pioneering hubs and how to make hubs better. We will discuss plans for further research.

Amount awarded: £39,549