As part of our focus on Shared Care Records this month, we’re recapping a fantastic live session delivered by the Humber, Coast and Vale Health and Care Partnership (HCV) at HTN Now.
In the webcast, the team from Humber, Coast and Vale took HTN and the audience along on a retrospective of its Shared Care Records (SCRs) journey.
The panel sharing their thoughts, learnings and experiences were John Mitchell, Associate Director of IT four Humber Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), who was part of the SCRs delivery, and Tara Athanasiou of the Humber, Coast and Vale digital team, who is the SCR Delivery Lead for the Humber region.
The duo provided over an hour of content during their presentation, deep-diving into their progress and challenges during the implementation of a Shared Care Record, which included platforming patient stories and staff perspectives, as well as an overview of the programme’s development and a glimpse at the next steps in their journey.
The session began with a short but emotional video – ‘Meet Simon’ – which introduced the story of Simon, a former patient and member of the project’s board, as well as one of the inspirations behind the team’s work. The video explained how Simon, who became tetraplegic following an accident, could benefit from the solutions provided by digital technology, including shared access of his care records, so that he and his family wouldn’t need to repeat his story to multiple health professionals.
John then went on to explain what the HCV Shared Care Record actually entails. He said: “Everything we do, we ask, ‘how would it help Simon or someone like Simon get better care?’
“Our vision is for all of our health and care services and their teams to have secure and appropriate access to a single point of truth…that might not be the full record of every system but it may be the important headlines they need to see.
“Our objective is to use the leverage that we’ve gained from the buy-in that all of our organisations have given us to provide the right information, to the right person, at the right time – which is a pretty good definition of empowerment. If we can empower our clinicians, we’ll end up with improved health and wellbeing [for] our people. They’ll have access to the full picture, so they can make better, informed judgements – whether that’s our professionals or our citizens themselves.
“The programme is locally and clinically driven, so we give our clinicians the opportunity to have a hands-on approach to steer us, guide us, [and] tell us what’s important to them – to own and to have a sense of ownership [with] our programme. In no way, shape or form is this an IT or digital-delivered system, it is very much about working in partnership, supporting the clinical and professional needs of our staff and citizens.”
John also provided a recap of the ‘early days’ of HCV’s Shared Care Records, revealing that as little as five years ago, they had very little – if any – record sharing. He also broke the journey down into bitesize steps: the summary care record; centrally managed S1 sharing green lists; replacing ‘standalone portals’ with ‘smart URLs into portals’; SLIP (EMIS and s1 direction integration); GP Connect; direct integration of EOL records; and the first step for local GPs to access the Yorkshire and Humber Care Record via the Yorkshire and Humber Local Health and Care Record (LHCRE) programme.
A second short video focused on clinical feedback and allowed the audience to hear the perspective of real-life staff working across health and care in Humber, Coast and Vale Health, before explaining how the Health and Care Partnership tackled the national SCR target to have an MVS (Minimum Viable Solution) 1.0 in place by September 2021.
Tara then stepped in to discuss HCV’s priorities moving forward, including MV 1.0 and beyond. She said: “We weren’t wanting for enthusiasm or potential projects that we could take forward…we were up against quite a strict deadline, we had to show delivery by the end of September, and we had to show value as part of that, as well.
“We set in place some agreed priorities and, I guess, a framework to which we were going to move and work to…our primary objective was to get that minimum shared care record in place, in between GPs and acute trusts.”
Other priorities touched on were to progress projects with mental health and community providers, as well as local authorities, to develop proof-of-concepts that could be extended to other providers after the September target, and then engaging these organisations to help them to understand clinical and operational requirements for SCRs.
Tara also shared the Yorkshire and Humber Care Record timeline to outline the journey, and their key achievements, and milestones on a month-by-month basis.
“This was really important. It showed that we’d already started our journey – we started to build that trust, as John said, and we had some really enthusiastic stakeholders,” she said, before John jumped back in to explain how they built their delivery team.
Advice and learnings in this section included creating a ‘blended team’ that was underpinned by common goals and transparency, putting the programme first, having no room for ‘politics’, and creating the right culture by being clear on expected behaviours.
Scope, planning and project prioritisation was also covered, before Tara outlined the requirements for project delivery, which included: defining and agreeing the project lifecycle, establishing standardised ways of working, building up the project, communications and governance assets, agreeing project tolerances and escalation procedures upfront, getting the right cadence of engagement and meetings, and having a consistent way of approaching benefit realisation and tracking.
John and Tara then summed up the HCV Yorkshire and Humber Care Record programme successes, before moving onto learnings.
“It was about education and winning hearts and minds – that has really underpinned our ability to move at pace”, Tara highlighted as she moved through the explanation, before concluding with future aims around up-skilling and embedding, building out, making the work sustainable, and extending MVS 1.0.
For all the in-depth learnings, and to find out about HCV’s journey in full, watch the video below:
