Connecting for Health is stepping up its clinical engagement drive with the appointment of new clinical leads for midwifery and mental health nursing and a planned mass distribution of key information about IT modernisation to nurses.
Funding for the new clinical leads was announced yesterday (1 May) by the Department of Health’s chief nursing officer, Chris Beasley, at a conference for nurses organised by CfH.
The new appointees will join the two clinical leads for nursing, Susan Osborne, who is also director of nursing services at St Mary’s Hospital, London, and Barbara Stuttle who leads on community nursing and is also executive nurse at South West Essex Primary Care Trust.
The new posts fill gaps in representation from the nursing and midwifery professions. “They will help us address some of the issues around midwifery and mental health,” said Stuttle.
A mass communication initiative with nurses will start soon with the planned distribution of data cards giving a brief summary of key aspects of the National Programme for IT.
The ‘Switch-on cards’ will offer a quick guide to a range of issues including the NHS Care Records Service, staff access to the electronic patient record, options for patients in recording information and benefits.
Designed on loosely-bound cards, it is hoped that the format will make it easy for nurses to hang them up at a nursing station for quick reference or for community practitioners to fit them into a bag.
Stuttle told the audience they would be published in the next couple of months and it was hoped they would provide an aide-memoire for clinical staff.
She showed examples of nurses using IT within the NHS including the Mobile Clinical Assistant launched in February after trials in Salford and community nurses in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire working on a system that enables them to update records in real time.
Work on the ‘wipe-able’ keyboard which promises to help cut hospital infection rates was also cited as a development to watch.
“We’d like to bring the price down so they can be available in any NHS unit, especially in acute units,” said Stuttle.