Urgent Community Response Team

The Urgent Community Response Team is part of the Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative, a partnership between Provide CIC, NELFT and EPUT. It is a community team that will help patients stay at home when they are feeling unwell, rather than be transferred to hospital. The UCRT service is designed with a ‘home first’ ethos and will provide specialist, nurse-led care in people’s own homes. You may already know the service in Southend, Castle Point and Rochford as SWIFT.

The team will support patients to feel better by visiting at home to provide the necessary assessments, medication and nursing interventions and aim to stabilise patients within five days.

All calls are answered by a senior triage nurse in the Single Point of Access, who will assess the case and advise if the service is able to stabilise and manage the patient, or whether they do need hospital-based care. A member of the team will then visit the patient within two hours. The Single Point of Access triages calls for UCRT services working across Mid, South and West Essex.

If at any point the patient deteriorates and can no longer be safely managed at home, the UCRT team will coordinate safe transfer to the hospital for an inpatient admission.