Nurses working within community health crisis response services will be expected to meet guideline recommendations and deliver services within two hours of referral by 2023.
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The NHS Long Term Plan set out its schedule of a ‘new NHS offer of urgent community response’, with ‘extra investment and productivity reforms’ forthcoming in community health services to increase capacity and improve responsiveness.
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As a result, health crisis teams in the community across all parts of England will have to deliver services within two hours of referral, where clinically judged to be appropriate, in order to meet guideline recommendations.
Teams will also be expected to deliver reablement care within two days of referral to those judged to be in need. NHS England claims this will ‘help prevent unnecessary admissions to hospitals and residential care’.
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To aid referrals, the NHS will roll out a new clinical assessment service from 2019/20, which will ‘simplify’ the process for GPs and other healthcare professionals when making urgent calls for response into community health teams.
