The green light for a £10million digital programme at one of the fast followers has been given the green light by NHS England.
Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which is a fast follower of the Global Digital Exemplar (GDE), Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, will receive funds to invest in digital technology and improved patient care systems across hospitals in Bury, Oldham, Rochdale and North Manchester.
This will be made up of £5million national funding which the trust is expecting to match, taking the total to £10million.
Dr Georges Ng Man Kwong, consultant chest physician and CCIO at the trust, said: “Being a GDE fast follower provides us with a great opportunity to try, implement and, if necessary, modify and improve new technologies to support patient care following ‘blueprint’ principles and processes which have already been tested at Salford.
“Importantly the programme runs alongside our infrastructure improvement and future Electronic Patient Record (EPR) programmes which, as a whole, will enable us to achieve a digital future for healthcare.”
Over the coming months staff will be reviewing new technology and methodologies.
The first phase of the programme will explore how staff can use:
- Digital task management app on wards – to improve patient task workflow and ultimately improve bed management with prompt discharge of patients
- Virtual consultation, including state-of-the-art mobile robotics, to help discharge patients
- New digital clinical decision support forms to support delirium and dementia, dietetics, VTE, stroke and FNOF pathways
- Online appointment management system for patients– introducing booking and scheduling reminders for patients in the first phase
The trust also plans to use the funding to set up two new digital experience centres to showcase new technology to staff and patients, which will be based at Royal Oldham and Fairfield Hospitals.
The first wave of GDE blueprints were revealed earlier this month, which allow any NHS hospital to implement improvements quicker and transform care for both patients and staff.
But they will be “useless” without allocation of resources for trusts to teach others how to implement the programmes, according to Michael Fisher, CCIO of Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust.
NHS England’s deputy chief executive has said GDEs must not become “havens” surrounded by “deserts” of paper records.
Speaking at the ‘Empowering people in a digital world’ conference on 13 February, Matthew Swindells said: “This is the first time the NHS had had a strategy where technology is at the absolute heart of it, so there’s a burden on everyone in the room to deliver the technology.”
1 March 2019 @ 08:16
Maybe the delay relates to the fact SRFT and PAT are now part of the same organisation under the banner of the Northern Care Alliance so i’s and t’s needed to be triple checked. I doubt they will complain, the organisation has seemingly received £5 million for basically following itself.
Not a criticism in any way, SRFT has a wealth of experience within their IM&T personnel and a suite of mature systems that work extremely well – their partners within the PAT hospital group will see a big benefit.
I doff my virtual hat 🙂 (and no I don’t work there nor ever have)
26 February 2019 @ 14:08
Why has it taken so long for the Trust to be given this ‘green light’ given they were announced as a fast follower in September 2017? That is 18 months from acceptance onto the fast follower scheme to being allocated funding.
The pace of change needs to ramp up considerably if any of the NHS Long Term Plan targets are going to be attempted never mind achieved!