All around England, the NHS and local councils are coming together with other local organisations to find innovative new ways to provide better care for citizens through sustainability and transformation plans (STPs). Although it’s a national scheme, each of the 44 plans is place-based and built around the needs of the local populations.

For Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust, their first step in that transformational journey was thousands of miles long – literally. To provide the 60+ services to 300,000 patients across its many locations in the STP footprint, Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust has a team of mobile and peripatetic staff, clinicians and service providers who work across the entire region. Together they were travelling nearly 7 million miles each year to see patients at home and in specialist centres.

One of the main reasons the Trust has been successful is the approach they have taken introducing Skype for Business. As Parkinson notes when it came to implementation: “We tried to make it not feel like they were adopting technology. We tried to get rid of the reasons why they would say it was hard to change.” Initially, Parkinson says, users viewed the adoption of Skype for Business as an IT project, but with a roll out team that helped to remove the barriers – everything from making it easy to add Skype for Business to meeting requests, to making agile help teams available to work Skype for Business into existing processes that depend on collaboration – users soon began to see it as an important tool that enabled them to improve the way they work, benefiting patients and themselves.

Learn more how Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust used Skype to implement new models of care team collaboration to improve patient care.

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Copyright: This case study was written by Microsoft Limited (company number 01624297) in conjunction with Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust.  

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