Esther Clift discusses a popular scheme that is preventing unnecessary hospital admissions

This article explores the work of a rapid response team (RRT) in an English city. The RRT is a multiprofessional intermediate care team that is able to support patients to remain at home during clinical crises and changes to their social care needs. The service is popular with patients and cost effective. The National Audit of Intermediate Care is in its fourth year and benchmarks how intermediate care services are delivered across England. RRT data are compared with the national data, and show that keeping the team as a crisis intervention service has enabled it to maintain capacity to support patients at home without requiring hospital admission.