Silver Book II: an international framework for urgent care of older people in the first 72 hours from illness or injury.

The new edition of the Silver Book, Silver Book II, provides a framework for the urgent care of older people in the first 72 hours from illness or injury. It incorporates principles of geriatric medicine, quality improvement (including patient reported outcome measures) and interdisciplinary care in a balanced, practical and evidence-rich manual on unscheduled and emergent care for older adults. Silver Book II shows how frailty, comprehensive geriatric assessment and shared decision-making can be locally adapted according to national practice and policy across the world.

Reducing Hospital Transfers from Aged Care Facilities: A Large-Scale Stepped Wedge Evaluation.

Background/objectives: Older people living in residential aged care facilities (RACFs) experience acute deterioration requiring assessment and decision making. We evaluated the impact of a large-scale regional Aged Care Emergency (ACE) program in reducing hospital admissions and emergency department (ED) transfers.

Design: A stepped wedge nonrandomized cluster trial with 11 steps, implemented from May 2013 to August 2016.

Improving access to acute stroke therapies: a controlled trial of organised pre-hospital and emergency care.

Objective: To assess the effectiveness of the PAST (Pre-hospital Acute Stroke Triage) protocol in reducing pre-hospital and emergency department (ED) delays to patients receiving organised acute stroke care, thereby increasing access to thrombolytic therapy.

Design: Prospective cohort study using historical controls.

Setting: Hunter Region of New South Wales, September 2005 to March 2006 (pre-intervention) and September 2006 to March 2007 (post-intervention).

Clinical process redesign for unplanned arrivals in hospitals.

*Emergency department performance had been deteriorating in NSW Health facilities and at Flinders Medical Centre before a fundamentally new approach involving a redesign method, additional bed capacity and more rigorous hospital performance management was applied. *Redesign was undertaken in over 60 hospitals in New South Wales. *Numerous disconnections and misalignments in the process of care delivery have been uncovered during the diagnostic phase of this redesign.