PatientPath 2026: Optimising NHS Pathways to Improve Patient Flow
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PatientPath 2026: Optimising NHS Pathways to Improve Patient Flow
A Strategic Summit on Optimising Patient Flow and System Coordination Across the NHS - All Convenzis Events Provide 8 CPD Points Per Delegate.
Take part in our conference prize draw by visiting all stands and scanning your lanyard at each for a chance to win £100 voucher.
Sponsors & Partners
Patient flow is the central challenge, and opportunity in modern NHS operations. From the “front door” of emergency departments to the “back door” of discharge and community care, every handover determines both efficiency and experience.
With emergency attendances and delayed discharges at record highs, the NHS is under renewed pressure to manage capacity, streamline pathways, and integrate care across acute, community, and primary settings. The 2025 Urgent and Emergency Care Recovery Plan and the NHS Workforce Plan both highlight system-wide flow improvement as a core national priority for the coming year.
This event brings together operational, clinical, and strategic leaders to share what’s working, what needs to change, and how local teams can build the capability to deliver safe, efficient, and patient-centred flow at scale.
Summit Focus:
The conference is designed as a skills-based, outcome-driven forum focused on system coordination, digital enablement, and workforce empowerment. Delegates will engage with real-world frameworks, tested improvement models, and peer learning to translate strategy into operational reality.
Dedicated Skill Clinics will explore front-door streaming, discharge innovation, and digital integration. Lessons Learned Sessions will offer candid accounts of challenges, recovery, and leadership under pressure.
This is not a showcase of what to achieve, but a collaborative exchange on how to achieve it, translating national ambition into measurable improvement.
What’s New for 2026?
This year’s summit introduces a sharper focus on practical capability-building and applied system learning, aligning directly with the NHS Urgent and Emergency Care Recovery Plan and NHS Workforce Plan.
- Skill Clinics on Flow Fundamentals: Delegates will participate in immersive sessions covering real-world implementation of front-door streaming, workforce culture, digital visibility, and discharge integration.
- Lessons Learned from National Exemplars: Live reflections from NHS systems that have transformed urgent care access and discharge flow, sharing both successes and setbacks.
- Operational Leadership Sessions: Focused dialogues exploring how COOs, Chief Nurses, and Clinical Leads are embedding flow improvement into daily operations and ICS governance.
- Community Coordination in Practice: Fresh insight into how UCR teams and primary care are being digitally connected to reduce hospital attendances and improve patient experience.
- Digital Flow Capability Frameworks: Step-by-step tools for operational teams to evaluate data readiness, analytics maturity, and digital command-centre models.
These updates ensure every attendee leaves with clear, actionable outputs and operational artefacts, ready to translate national priorities into measurable improvements across patient flow, discharge, and system resilience.
This year’s event is structured around clear outcomes. Delegates will leave understanding:
- The optimisation of front-door streaming and triage models, including UTC integration and digital pre-arrival platforms.
- The embedding of attendance avoidance through strengthened community and UCR coordination.
- The design of integrated discharge models that unite acute, community, and care teams.
- The enhancement of digital visibility across patient flow using analytics and shared dashboards.
- The development of workforce and cultural alignment across departments and specialities to support whole-system flow.
Why Attend?
- Strengthen leadership confidence in managing whole-system flow.
- Access practical frameworks for triage, discharge, and community coordination.
- Gain peer-tested insights from trusts leading on flow transformation.
- Take away ready-to-use templates, governance checklists, and improvement guides.
- Earn 8 CPD Points while joining a community focused on sustainable system performance.
Who Would Benefit?
This summit is designed for COOs, Chief Nurses, Flow and Discharge Leads, Operations Directors, AHPs, and Community Integration Managers working across acute and system settings. It will also benefit ICS and ICB transformation teams, urgent and emergency care leads, and primary/community service directors seeking scalable approaches to managing demand, flow, and discharge.
Your Pass Includes....
- This conference is CPD accredited. Attendees will be eligible to gain 8 CPD points upon completion of the event.
- Access to a leading conference speaker programme
- Interactive Q&A sessions
- Leadership Lessons from the Front Line
- Cross-sector best practice
- Meet the supplier opportunities
- Hot breakfast & Lunch included
- Access to post event drinks reception and Street food
Tickets For NHS Senior Managers
We have an invite only option for NHS Senior Managers for our conference, to see if you qualify for a complimentary place please click the button below.
Conference Speakers
The programme
Registration & Networking
Registration - Open from 8:20 am - Closes at 11:00 am
All delegates must complete their registration process before the 11:00 AM cut-off time. Please arrive in a timely manner to allow for registration and to avoid any inconvenience. Delegates who arrive after the registration deadline will be refused entry to the event.
We appreciate your cooperation in helping us maintain the event's schedule and ensuring that everyone can fully participate in the conference. If you have any questions or require assistance, our event staff will be available to assist you with the registration process.
Thank you for your understanding, and we look forward to an insightful and productive event together!
Keynote Presentation - Getting the Front Door Right: Reimagining Streaming and Triage (TBC)
Session Overview:
This session explores how trusts are redesigning emergency and urgent care streaming models. From digital front doors to UTC integration, attendees will hear how demand management and clinical triage can transform access, experience, and safety.
Morning Skills Clinic - Discharge Planning Innovation: Practical Tools and Models (TBC)
Session Overview:
This interactive clinic explores practical approaches to integrated discharge planning. Drawing on real-world examples from leading NHS trusts, participants will engage with templates, frameworks, and tools designed to align clinical, community, and social care teams helping to minimise delays, improve patient flow, and reduce readmissions.
Headline Sponsor - The operational foundation for Same Day Emergency Care
Headline Sponsor - DNV Imatis
Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) is central to the NHS plan to reduce A&E pressure and get patients treated in the right place, at the right time. To make SDEC work, it's cruical to ensure the operational flow behind them: rapid diagnostics, available beds, coordinated support services, and seamless communication between teams.
In this session, DNV Imatis will share lessons from Nordic hospitals on how digital coordination improves patient flow and supports SDEC ambitions. We will show how:
- Bed turnaround and real-time capacity visibility ensure SDEC units have space when it’s needed.
- Digital task management speeds diagnostics and supports timely discharge.
- A workflow-first approach, shaped with clinicians, reduces friction for frontline staff while giving managers dashboards to detect and resolve bottlenecks.
By bridging frontline workflows with operational oversight, hospitals can build the foundation for effective and sustainable SDEC, and improve flow both for same-day patients and across the whole hospital.
Case Study - Enovation
Case Study - Enovation
About us:
We are Enovation. We’re here for the healthcare sector. We’re here for the dedicated professionals who devote their personal attention to each and every patient. We’re here for the organisations who provide ever more complex care to a rising number of people with fewer staff. We’re here for the clinicians and the caregivers. And we’re here for the patients and their families who want to receive the assistance and care they need, today, tomorrow and in the future.
We assist by developing connected care solutions that support healthcare professionals and clients in an innovative way. Digital tools that allow organisations to provide digital care in a smart, efficient way and collaborate with one another and with the client.
This is how we contribute to the healthcare system of the future; to help create a more effective, less prone to human errors and more efficient system. A system in which we rely on technology, but that allows healthcare providers to focus on the most important thing: giving patients their time and attention.
Case Study
Case Study
Lessons from the Frontline - The Back Door Challenge: Integrating Discharge for Safer Flow (TBC)
Session Overview:
Join an open fireside conversation exploring the innovative “3-way care model” and other approaches that bring together acute, community, and social care. Our speakers will share insights from the frontline on embedding discharge planning early, enhancing patient flow, and supporting patient choice, highlighting practical lessons that can be applied across health and social care settings.
Case Study. - QuidelOrtho
Case Study - QuidelOrtho
With expertise spanning clinical chemistry, immunoassay, immunohematology and molecular testing, QuidelOrtho Corporation (Nasdaq: QDEL) is a leading global provider of diagnostic solutions, delivering fast, accurate and reliable results that help improve patient outcomes from the point of care to lab, clinic to hospital. Building on a legacy of innovation, QuidelOrtho works with healthcare providers to advance diagnostics that connect insights with solutions, defining a clearer path for informed decisions and better care.
Case Study - GAMA Healthcare (Rediroom)
Case Study - GAMA Healthcare (Rediroom)
GAMA Healthcare, established in 2004 by doctors Guy Braverman and Allen Hanouka, leads in the manufacture and distribution of innovative infection prevention solutions that help prevent healthcare-associated infections around the world.
With leading healthcare brands including Clinell, HEXI, Rediair and Rediroom, GAMA’s technologies are used in 9 out of 10 hospitals in the UK’s NHS.
As a dynamic company with scientific and clinical excellence at its core, GAMA is committed to providing innovative solutions and professional support. Pioneering research and continuous innovation from GAMA’s state-of-the-art laboratory (Fellows Research Centre) and providing comprehensive infection prevention training and education to end users.
NHS Deep Dive - Transforming frailty care with a whole pathway approach
Session Overview:
This session will explore the growing evidence base for delivering effective frailty care within community settings and why integrated, proactive approaches are becoming essential across the NHS. The discussion will highlight the South West London Model of Care for frailty, outlining how services can coordinate across the full patient pathway to support earlier intervention, improve outcomes, and reduce avoidable hospital demand.
The session will also consider how national models of care for frailty are evolving, examining emerging best practice and how systems can adapt their local strategies to meet the needs of an ageing population. Delegates will gain practical insights into designing and implementing joined-up frailty pathways that improve patient experience while strengthening system resilience.
Case Study
Case Study
Presentation - The Ownership Effect – Why Giving Staff the Pen Rewrites Improvement
Session Overview:
The presentation will describe the journey one trust went through from recognising that their unplanned care wasn’t where it needed to be and how through true staff empowerment improvement ideas were designed, tested and embedded.
Afternoon Skills Clinic - Getting ahead of demand: real-time patient flow prediction at UCLH
Session Overview:
Hospitals are generating more real-time data than ever, but turning it into timely, actionable forecasts is still often a manual and piecemeal process. This session explores how UCLH and UCL have worked together to change that.
Drawing on data from Epic, the team has developed a prediction tool that gives operational staff targeted, real-time forecasts of bed demand, broken down by speciality, so that the right people have the right information at the right moment. The session will walk through how the tool works, how it is being implemented at UCLH, and what it is already meaning in practice for bed management and capacity planning.
It will also look beyond UCLH. The approach has been designed to work across different electronic patient record systems, and pilot studies are now underway with hospitals in the UK and Sweden. Attendees will leave with a clear sense of what is realistically achievable, how to identify the right people in their own organisation to get started, and how predictive analytics can support a shift from reactive to anticipatory patient flow management.
Breakout Skills Clinic - Taster of Covenzis Training: Navigating tensions to get things done in patient flow
Session Overview:
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