Elderly care

A weekly consultant led multidisciplinary falls clinic, is based in our Battle Block outpatients and Therapies department. Patients can be referred from a variety of routes, including the Emergency Department, General Practice and community partners.

Elderly patients with Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders are reviewed in weekly multidisciplinary clinics led by Dr Apurba Chatterjee and Dr Nida Butt. The service is supported by three specialist nurses working in the Trust and the community. They support patients at home with domiciliary visits and also run community clinics in Wokingham, Newbury and Henley.

A liaison service was established in 2004 with the comprehensive Orthogeriatric service starting in August 2007 after the appointment of a 2nd Orthogeriatrician. There is daily input to the orthopaedic wards with pre-operative assessment and multidisciplinary rehabilitation. In 2015 a brand new (subsequently award winning) Hip Fracture Unit was established within Elderly Care (on Emmer Green ward). Patients are admitted directly from ED to provide perioperative care, multidisciplinary input and rehabilitation.

A research database, the Oxford and Reading Cognitive Comorbidity, Frailty and Ageing Research Database – Electronic Patient Records, (ORCHARD-EPR) has been created containing anonymised hospital data from both the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust and Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. (Ethics ref 23/SC/0258).

ORCHARD-EPR informs the care of patients with cognitive impairment, complex comorbidity, and physical frailty. The database will hold routinely acquired data on RBHFT adult in-patients or acute ambulatory care patients including demographics (age, sex), cognitive function (abbreviated mental test score (AMTS), delirium, and dementia diagnoses) clinical details including comorbidities, in-patient complications including falls and pressure sores, length of stay, discharge destination, mortality and readmission as well as observations (e.g. heart rate, blood pressure), laboratory results and brain scans.

Anonymised clinical data are obtained from the RBHFT information team and transferred to the database which is held in a secure University of Oxford computing environment controlled by researchers based at the Wolfson Centre for Prevention of Stroke and Dementia (CPSD)in Oxford. The research database will be used to examine the prevalence and associated complications of cognitive comorbidity (dementia, delirium, other cognitive impairment), all-cause co-morbidity and physical frailty across different specialities in the OUHFT and RBHFT and their association with adverse outcomes including falls, pressure sores, length of stay, mortality and readmission as well as trends over time. 

If you would prefer that your anonymised routinely acquired data is not used in ORCHARD-EPR, please contact: Jade Goddard via Jade.Goddard@royalberkshire.nhs.uk or 44 (0) 118 322 5474.