Each week as part of our Health Tech Heroes series we recognise and say thank you to those in health tech making a real difference.
Here in the second part in the series, we cover some of the amazing work this week where teams across the country have been working around the clock to deliver technology at pace to support health and care.
You can view the first in the series here, or you can nominate your Health Tech Hero here.
This national programme is open to anyone and every nomination will receive a Health Tech Hero mug – for when you have time to one day enjoy a cuppa!
The Health Tech Heroes this week:
Tech Bar Team at the Christie
Melanie Ince, Applications Manager, The Christie NHS Foundation Trust said “Tech Bar are providing the equipment and support for hundreds of us at the Christie to work at home. They are superstars and greet us all warmly with a great deal of patience.”
“The only time that we usually contact them is when we can’t make the technology work. They have been inundated with work recently and have risen to the challenge of this strange time. The unsung heroes, allowing services to continue to keep our patients and employees safe.”
IT, Informatics, Information and IG team at Wirral University Teaching Hospital
Paul Charnley, Director of IT and Informatics “The whole Informatics Department has been absolutely incredible in response to the Covid-19 crisis.”
“They have gone far beyond expectations to enable staff to work remotely while keeping valuable patient data available. They have built and distributed hundreds of laptops and PCs, installed dozens of cameras for remote monitoring of patients to save PPEs. They have also rolled out Teams across the hospital and implemented new ways of communicating with the staff from a text broad cast to apps and more. Perhaps most poignantly we have help families talk to their loved ones in the midst of all this turmoil.”
Our CCIO Gerry O’Sullivan said “I would be delighted to nominate the team. You have all risen to an unprecedented challenge and then asked “what else can we do”?!
Randal Whitmore
Rachel Murphy, CEO, Difrent “Randal has been seconded over to help NHSX as product owner of the testing service that has been built in the last 9 days from scratch. This service is patient facing and needed a GDS assessment. He has worked with Amazon, NHSX and NHS BSA to make this a reality. The service went live in a private beta yesterday.”
The St Helens and Knowsley Health Informatics Team
Judith Nicholson, Assistant Director, STHK Health Informatics “The St Helens and Knowsley Health Informatics Team has been supporting partner organisations – St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, 85 GP practices, St Helens, Knowsley and Halton CCGs, Bridgewater Community Healthcare NHS Trust and North West Boroughs Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust to mobilise their business continuity plans in light of the current COVID-19 crisis.”
“Between 23 and 28 March 2020, 455 PCs and Laptops have been set up and delivered, ‘always-on’ VPN has been enabled for all partners, the Service Desk has taken 5200 calls in 8 days, over 850 skype calls a day have been made along with 5000 instant messages with 1800 staff now using the systems from home (increasing every day).”
“The team has enabled Desktop Virtualisation, updated numerous websites and issued guides and e-learning packages for everything from ‘Plugging your PC in at home’ to ‘Using Skype for Business’. Many changes have been made to systems to facilitate the collection and reporting of data and the creation of new wards, letter changes and clinic changes to support Telehealth.”
“Several telehealth clinics have gone live in a rolling programme – it has already been remarked by clinicians that this will change the way clinical services work forever. Data sharing across organisations has been supported by the Information Governance with many simple Data Protection Impact Assessments. Staff have changed roles, been deployed into other areas and increased their operating hours to meet demand and provide out of hours cover.”
“Numerous emails of appreciation have been received and we are extremely proud to be able to work together as a team and support our partners through these difficult times.”
Ciaron Hoye, Andy Evans, Alexis Farrow, Andy Kinnear, Mike Press, Damien Williams, Jane Berzynskyj and team
Nicole Atkinson, ICS Clinical Lead, NOTTS ICS said “This amazing team developed a cloud based virtual desktop solution to enable primary care to access clinical records from their own PCs. Revolutionary not just for enabling primary care staff self-isolating to work remotely during Covid, but I have no doubt this will prove to be the game-changer in how we see our workforce delivering care in the future. This really is a practice in a box!”
Paul Richardson, Cardiology Data and IT, Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital
Toomas Sarev, Service Director, Cardiology, Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital “Paul is our Cardiology Data and IT expert. He is always extremely helpful and responsive. We run a busy and stretched service. We have developed our own tailored solution for workflows and documentation, booking system and discharge reporting as well as procedural reporting system for interventions, pacing and electrophysiology. A lot of our success is due to Pauls perseverance and positive mindset. He is a bit like an unsung hero.”
Rachel Benn -100% Digital Leeds
Alexis Farrow, Head of Strategy and Transformation said “Rachel is the Digital Inclusion Co-ordinator at 100% Digital Leeds, she leads on supporting people across Leeds manage their health and LTC through the use of technology. Lots of her work required supporting people accessing digital services, such as people with dementia, through face to face contact. Since the Covid-19 outbreak she has not been able to do this so has come up with innovative ways such as virtual coffee mornings to enable her to still support the most socially and digitally isolated people.”
Ross Prestwich and Hameed Mamaniat at Blackpool Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Gurkaran Samra, Clinical Informatician, Blackpool Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said “Ross and Hameed are members of our in-house app dev team. In response to the emerging COVID challenge, Ross and Hamed have worked overtime to create an application to track all COVID swab samples for patients admitted to our hospital.”
“This application provides clinical teams with real time automated eAlerts for positive results, provides updates on pending results, and provides our Respiratory COVID outreach team, research team and critical care team with a platform to prioritise and review patients, create notes and record clinical information. The app integrates with all our other in-house developed clinical apps for referrals, path/rad results and clinical documents.”
“The app forms the basis for our Business Intelligence and Data Science teams to gain real time insights of emerging datasets to provide the required intelligence to our clinical and operational teams. The app was developed in a turnaround time of 3 days from receiving a functional specification.”
“This app allows clinical and operational teams access to a single version of the truth to care for patients in a safe and efficient manner.”
Jack Pottle & Mike Wallace, Co founders of Oxford medical simulation
Bex Thompson, Clinical Lead, Oxford Medical Simulation “Providing free access to our virtual simulation scenarios to any healthcare institution in the UK or US which feel it will help support their doctors or nurses or students in the current crisis.”
“This means students and trainees can access on screen scenarios and practice managing acutely deteriorating patients for free from their own homes. In a time where students have been sent home and healthcare professionals are being asked to work in new sectors, this software will really help support those in need of learning and simulation. So far over 17000 users have signed up. For free!”
Saeed Umar at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, NHS Foundation Trust
Chandbi Sange, Research Nurse, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals “Saeed has helped provide remote access to those working from home, obtaining and distributing laptops and individual head sets for meetings.”
“Even under stress Saeed has supported the entire organisation, supported his own team and never stopped working. Although he has himself been under immense stress and pressure from all the organisation he provided teams with what they need to continue patient care with safety and intelligence.”
The IT team at St Margaret’s Hospice Care (based in Taunton and Yeovil)
Gordon Richardson, Communications Manager, St Margaret’s Hospice Care said “Since the Coronavirus crisis began, the IT team at St Margaret’s Hospice Care have risen to the challenge and gone the extra mile to enable the charity to continue delivering its vital end of life care services to the people of Somerset.”
“They urgently sourced and issued new laptops to 35 staff who were not already set up for remote working. As well as delivering training in how to access hospice IT systems remotely, the team have produced a series of user guides at short notice, which have been made available on our intranet.”
“Work to develop our bespoke patient portal in recent years is now paying dividends, as community-based nurses and healthcare assistants are able to access and update patient records remotely.”
“With many non-clinical staff now working from home for the first time, the team have also been handling increased demand for IT support from those working remotely, as well as proactively updating all users with information on how to overcome common problems. iPads not currently being used by staff have been made available to patients on our In-patient Unit, so they can keep in touch with family and friends through video calling.”
