West Herts Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust’s award-winning Hospital at Home (Virtual Hospital) service has shared its expertise with senior clinicians from France and Belgium.
A delegation of 15 healthcare professionals - including doctors, nurses and healthcare managers - visited Watford General Hospital to learn how the Trust’s Virtual Hospital operates and to understand how the service has successfully developed since its launch.
West Herts, in partnership with Central London Community Healthcare (CLCH), established the UK’s first Virtual Hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, the service has provided a safe alternative to inpatient care for many patients, saving thousands of hospital bed days.
The Hospital at Home model enables patients to receive hospital-level care from the comfort of their own homes through the use of remote monitoring technology and specialist clinical support.
The visit was a part of a two-day programme titled ‘Hospital at Home in the United Kingdom: New Models of Care’. Delegates were given the opportunity to learn about the successful implementation of the Virtual Hospital, which has been operating at West Herts since 2021.
The delegates also heard about the clinical pathways and model of care which are led across the South West Herts Health Care Partnership, met the multidisciplinary team and saw demonstrations of the technology used to support patients at home.
International visits such as this highlight what is possible within an embedded and integrated virtual ward system delivered in partnership with community providers, while also demonstrating the growing international interest in the Trust’s work.
Dr Niall Keenan, Divisional Director for Medicine at Watford General Hospital, said:
“We were delighted to host a visit from a group of senior French and Belgian clinicians to showcase our nationally leading Virtual Ward and Hospital at Home service.
“Visits like this are important to demonstrate ‘the art of the possible’ within a developed, integrated virtual ward system. The international interest we are seeing also reflects the quality and impact of the work our teams are delivering.”
Michel Calmon, former CEO of France’s main Hospital at Home organisation, who joined the delegation, said:
“Our visit to Watford General Hospital has been very interesting. We were shown the different clinical pathways that make up the UK’s Hospital at Home system, which allowed us to compare it with the French model.
“The French system is much older, whereas the UK’s approach largely developed during the Covid period. We were particularly interested in the tools and devices used here, some of which are not widely used in France. We greatly appreciated the opportunity to meet so many experienced teams and learn from their expertise.”