Older People's Unit
Urgent advice and on-call Geriatrician
Urgent Advice
The best way to seek urgent advice about admission avoidance or to discuss a potential admission of a frail patient is to call via the Cinapsis App, clicking on Acute Frailty service.
The service is live 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday and 8am to 5pm weekends and outside of these hours there is a link to acute medicine. There is also a non-urgent older adult medicine service on Cinapsis receiving calls and e-opinions.
If you do not have Cinapsis access you can call the Acute Frailty telephone on:
07584 771329
Ward rounds
The Older People's Unit carries out a separate on-call rota from the rest of the medical division, and therefore there is always a Geriatrician of the Day for patient advice as needed. We are happy to discuss patients with other teams within the hospital, or with GPs, especially around the area of admission avoidance.
The post take Geriatrician starts with the Geriatrics post-take ward round at 8am, seeing all the acutely admitted patients considered to be appropriate for our service. Criteria for which patients are appropriate to be seen on the geriatrics post-take ward round can be found here:
Criteria for Post Take Geriatric Ward Round
There is also a Geriatrician of the Day who is available from 8am to 8pm who sees new admissions with frailty arriving that day.
Weekend cover
At the weekends, there is geriatrician cover from 8am to 5pm. The geriatrician of the day sees post take and new admissions and also sees any hip fracture patients that have been admitted out of hours. There is also consultant geriatrician cover on OPAU and for the rest of the OPU wards to support care and discharges requiring consultant review or decision.
Contacting Geriatricians
The Geriatrician varies from day to day, but they can always be contacted through switch as needed. Additionally we have an email account (ruh-tr.olderpeople@nhs.net) which is checked daily by the secretaries and queries forwarded to the most appropriate person for response.