NHS Improvement: Delayed transfer of care (DTOC) improvement tool (last updated Sept 2019)

Summary

This tool has been developed by NHS Improvement to enable trusts, clinical commissioning groups and local authorities to understand where delayed transfers of care are in their area or system.

Content

This tool brings together data already submitted by NHS organisations and local authorities into an easy to use dashboard which as well as showing where their biggest delays are, also allows them to track the progress of any actions.

The tool also tracks data over time and uses a technique called statistical process control (SPC) to:

• identify when interventions result in an improvement
• highlight when activities are not resulting in change, indicating that a change of approach is required

SPC is one of the best ways to look at data as it identifies change that is statistically significant rather than due to chance.