Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust has published its three-year trust strategy, supported by a series of enabling strategies outlining plans and priorities for care, people, working together, and research and innovation.
The trust commits to exploring the potential uses of digital solutions and delivering digitally empowered care, vowing to use technology to make care more accessible and personalised, and to support colleagues to work “efficiently and effectively”.
Plans around digitally empowered care involve promoting digital access to services and support, introducing new digital tools to make care more efficient, embracing new ways of working enabled by digital, and making it easier to collect, use, and share data to facilitate the planning of services and evidence-based decision making.
Working with system partners, the trust also looks to utilise public health data and neighbourhood-level intelligence to plan collaborative actions around population health and inequalities.
Digital also plays a role in GMMH’s people strategy, whereby the trust looks to improve digital literacy and skills, automate workforce systems and information, and better use data and analytics to increase productivity. Digital skills required for the future will form part of the recruitment process. moving forward, it states.
For research and innovation, the focus is on fully integrating research and innovation systems across all areas of practice, leveraging digital technologies and data-driven approaches. As part of this, the trust hopes to collaborate with digital and informatics teams to embed research functionality into its EPR. By 2030, GMMH’s target is to use digital tools for recruitment or data capture in more than 80 percent of new studies.
Elsewhere, the trust has moved forward with a memorandum of understanding on a joint EPR programme with Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, outlining the joint approach to procurement, governance, resourcing, and decision-making. The joint approach is intended to ensure the successful implementation of an EPR solution, providing a consistent and unified patient record, aligning with national NHS digital strategies and regulatory requirements, sharing expertise, and to support “cost-effective resource allocation”.
Wider trend: The shift from analogue to digital
The UK government published its Fit for the Future: The 10 Year Health Plan for England in summer, aiming to “build a truly modern NHS”, with focus on moving from hospital to community, analogue to digital and sickness to prevention. The plan outlines a new operating model, a new era of transparency, a new workforce model with staff aligned to the direction, a reshaped innovation strategy, and a different approach to NHS finances. AI, technology and digital tools play a key role in realising the ambitions in the plan, with the UK government signalling the intention for patients to gain “real control through a single, secure and authoritative account of their data and single patient record” aiming to deliver more co-ordinated, personalised and predictive care.
An end of year update from NHS England has revealed that the NHS App has now reached more than 39 million users, with 62.3 million logins in November, and 67.8 million repeat prescriptions ordered through the app in the past 12 months. New features include an “Amazon-style” prescription tracker that gives patients information on whether their medication is ready to be collected, and a family feature supporting parents and carers in managing their loved ones’ health.
The UK Government has launched its strategic vision for men’s health, noting plans to encourage men to take charge of their physical and mental health and wellbeing, expand access to services, and reduce inequalities. The shift to digital outlined in the 10-Year Health Plan will also reflect the specific needs of men, the DHSC states, committing to exploring opportunities for men to access tailored information, support, and test booking from home via expansion of the NHS App. A new NHS HealthStore will promote access to approved digital tools and NICE approved apps to support men with weight loss and Type 2 diabetes management.
