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 third 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 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:
Warrington & Halton Teaching Hospitals Digital Services and clinicians providing their time to support a range of service improvements
Phil James, Chief Information Officer “The incident is demanding new data capture, new ways of working, new ways of caring and new ways of managing.”
“Our teams have actively delivered a range of schemes at pace from EPR data capture, dashboard and reports production and tuning, remote working capacity and capability (both corporate and frontline), resulting solutions, Staff Training, Command Centre infrastructure plus frontline devices for staff and patients alike. Whilst the use of telephony (and email!) has increased our teams are focusing upon deployment of Outpatients Video consultations in a safe manner and have also provided staff to support colleagues in non-Digital services where required. The huge effort continues…”
Lauren Lucasiewicz from NHS Digital
Celia Ingham Clark, MD for Professional Leadership and Clinical Effectiveness, NHS England “In response to our urgent enquiry to help bring tens of thousands of health care professionals back into NHS service to meet the Coronavirus challenge, Lauren stepped forward with a Qualtrix survey, built it around the content we wanted over a weekend then continued to run it and amend it as needed over a two week period until more than 20,000 staff had used it as their route back into NHS service.”
Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust IT team
Deborah Needham, Chief Operating Officer/Deputy CEO “Many people in the hospital have been able to cease the BAU work during the covid-19 response. The IT team however have not. The team have rallied around to set up the incident control room in the space of 24hrs with PCs, TVs and screens they have responded immediately to developing databases to capture information, setting up new email addresses & even adding themselves to work overtime in clinical areas when the need arises. The team itself is led by a CIO, but the real stars have been the “heads of” Dave Smith, Graham Kershaw, Sally Shocklidge, Rich Smith & Sean McGarvey. They are true unsung heroes of NGH & deserve to be thanked.”
Alder Hey Digital Futures Service
Kate Warriner, Chief Digital and Information Officer “Alder Hey’s Digital Service have emerged from the shadows and become recognised heroes. In the last 3 weeks, they have moved from early days implementation of our Digital Futures strategy with focused and extremely rapid delivery of:
- Telemedicine from a standing start form Community to Specialist Services, providing digital care to children and young people
- Rolled out Microsoft Teams as THE key communications tool for every meeting, from Trust Board to daily Live Broadcast from CEO to MDTs
- Established and had over 1000 people through our new “digital genius bar”, running seven days a week to support staff
- Delivered personal tech to enable all staff to work remotely
- Rapidly adapted the EPR to support clinical configuration changes
“The Digital Team has truly worked round the clock as a team, going above and beyond normal working to be responsive to all requests for help and advice, wherever that may be needed; from the CEO to the clinical support staff – always with a smile.”
“This amazing work has been recognised by colleagues and patients across the board.”
“Digital at Alder Hey has been recognised as a, if not the, core driver of our work, from ward to Board.”
Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust: The Digital Directorate
Beth Lawton, CDIO said “In under 3 weeks they have:
- Enabled over 1000 clinicians to carry out virtual consultations
- Increased remote access tenfold (and are now working nights to increase it to fortyfold)
- Bought, built and distributed hundreds of laptops to enable remote working
- Introduced virtual meetings and webinars
- Equipped all our 40 wards with virtual consultation and tablets to allow patients to call home
- Set up and configured a complete new 24/7 helpline
- Trained everyone who will use the new technology
- Built a staff app
- Set up three new Mental Health ‘Emergency Rooms’
- Amended core systems to allow for physical health recording
- And wrote the reports that will show us how well we are managing this crisis/challenge
And at the same time maintained our usual service levels and maintained progress on our key GDE projects. I am so proud of what we have achieved together.”
Exasoft – supporting people with mental health directly
Alex Cotton, Team Manager, Mental Health Street Triage, Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership Trust “It Takes Balls to Talk have been supported by Exasoft with a kind contribution of time and patience to work alongside and help us reach and protect more people than we could alone improving our online presence.”
“Recently, they made a huge difference, helping us to create a poster that will engage police officers to make calls to the Street Triage team as we are no longer present in the police station and calls to us had dropped significantly. This poster will enable us to support people with poor mental health directly, diverting them from A&E. This will contribute to a reduction in use of police ambulance and hospital staff, helping to reduce the spread of Covid-19.”
“Your awards have inspired us to make an electronic version of It Takes Balls to Talk events. We know that 75% of people who take their lives are men and 75% of them have not sought support before doing so. It Takes Balls to Talk usually attend football, rugby, ice hockey and other male dominated sporting events, taking mental health support and advice directly to men and those who care about them encouraging them to identify a listening mate and start talking.”
Stuart Harwood, Darren Miller, Mo Sarwar, Mark Bailey – CWPT
Christopher Hughes, Infrastruture Lead, CWPT “Really proud of the team we have setup remote access for 75 GP practices from scratch and we can now get 2700 staff in working remotely. This is being done via Citrix on old repurposed hardware in the data centre and Cisco any connect VPN for trust-owned laptops.”
Paul Targett, Managing Director, RIVIAM Digital Care
Claire Hopkins, Customer Success Director “Paul has worked tirelessly over the last few weeks, day and night, weekdays and weekends, to set up a new call centre and Compassionate Community Hub for vulnerable people in Bath and North East Somerset during COVID-19. He’s brought in all the tech infrastructure and the telephony and, within one week, the hub (which is managed by Virgin Care, BaNES council and 3SG) was up and running, receiving calls from people who need help. In the next week, all the requests will be managed and co-ordinated online using RIVIAM and it’s a brilliant example of healthcare, social care and 3rd sector all working together to help people using digital tools.”
