Senior clinicians from France and Belgium have visited Watford General Hospital to learn more about West Herts Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust’s award-winning Hospital at Home (Virtual Hospital) service.
A delegation of 15 healthcare professionals, including doctors, nurses and healthcare managers, toured the hospital to see how the Virtual Hospital works and how it has developed since launching during the Covid-19 pandemic.
West Herts, working in partnership with Central London Community Healthcare (CLCH), set up the UK’s first Virtual Hospital. The service provides hospital-level care to patients in their own homes using remote monitoring technology and specialist clinical support. It has already helped save thousands of hospital bed days.
The visit was part of a two-day programme called ‘Hospital at Home in the United Kingdom: New Models of Care’. Delegates learned how the service has been running at West Herts since 2021 and heard about the clinical pathways led across the South West Herts Health Care Partnership.
They also met the multidisciplinary team and saw demonstrations of the technology used to support patients at home.
NHS England selected West Herts as one of only three trusts to take part in the international tour, recognising it as a national leader in virtual care. The programme also included visits to Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust.
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.”
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