Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust has set out its digital delivery goals and priorities for 2026/27, focusing on using data to improve the health of communities, using tech to support people to be well at home, providing better access to care, making life easier for staff, and delivering more productivity.
As well as developing digital maturity through EPR implementation, connecting data through the Federated Data Platform, and making the NHS App the primary front door for patient access, the trust plans to work on its digital foundations in a number of priority areas.
For 2026/27, actions to be delivered include partnering with university colleagues for research on emerging digital technologies and evaluations of digital innovation, to increase expertise and evidence on their impact. Lancashire and South Cumbria will also be scaling its approach to interoperability, enabling integrated system data and digital referrals, implementing EMIS into physical health services, implementing electronic prescriptions, building outcome measurement and tracking in EPR, and working on clinical coding. This work is hoped to promote availability of data, improve the reliability of referrals, reduce harm and the number of incidents reported, and improve the measurement of outcomes and compliance. Scaling the use of robotic process automation, Copilot, and ambient voice technologies is also an aim, the trust continues, whilst maturing the use of data analytics to support its health inequalities plan will enable data to be used to drive decisions and improvement work.
The trust shares ambitions to collaborate with partners to create real-world testing environments for digital innovations, to use data science and AI to drive innovation, to prioritise cloud-based solutions, and to provide a platform for the sharing and exploration of new digital ideas.
LSCFT further plans to “move from the language of ‘corporate services’ to ‘support services’ to reflect the role that non-clinical colleagues have in supporting clinical colleagues to maximise the time and impact that they offer to patients”. This includes rebranding corporate functions such as HR and finance as support services, ensuring every aspect of the support structure directly supports patient care or reduced admin burden for clinical teams, and benefiting from economies of scale and the consolidation of back office functions into shared services. This also covers digital transformation, and the move from manual processes to digital tools, using AI-driven administrative processes to free-up staff time for patient-facing tasks.
A new digital governance structure has been established to support coordination and oversight of the trust’s digital plan, it states. There is also expected to be an impact on workforce, with the trust looking to adopt a “train, retain, and reform” approach to providing existing staff with opportunities for career development. The impact of new technologies such as ambient voice technology and digital dictation have been reflected in the latest workforce plan, it goes on, “with a reduction in admin workforce of 69.5 WTE expected to materialise by October 2026”.
Moving on to discuss existing achievements, the trust highlights the rollout of its Rio ReCHARGED programme, a data warehouse replacement, datacentre upgrade, and the development of plans to harness the opportunities posed by AI, Microsoft Copilot, and ambient dictation. It sets out alignment of its enabler plan with the 10-Year Plan’s three shifts, focusing on living labs, monitoring, wearables, and virtual wards for hospital to community; ambient voice technology, e-observations, EMIS, Rio virtual assistant, e-prescribing, and online consultations for the shift from analogue to digital; and predictive analytics and waiting list validation for sickness to prevention.
Wider trend: Digital plans and priorities
In its most recent meeting, the NHS England board offered a series of updates around cyber resilience, single patient record, neighbourhood technology, the genomics programme, and 10-Year Plan acceleration programmes, citing “a number of concerns” that need to be addressed prior to investment commitments. These include a lack of executive involvement and no clear business owner to be accountable for resulting operational and business change; the absence of a technical or operational deliverability assessment; and “no clear articulation” of how accelerated components like Wayfinder connect to the Modern Service Framework pathway redesign approach. Detailed acceleration plans will now be drawn up to identify and address these challenges.
Sir James Mackey, chief executive at NHS England, has outlined next steps on planning and priorities for 2026/27 in an open letter to ICB and trust chief executives. Mackey starts by congratulating execs on progress toward operational targets on referral to treatment and urgent and emergency care, adding: “What we absolutely need to avoid is the risk that, while we are rightly focused on making 2026/27 a success, we miss maximising the opportunity the multi-year planning process gives us to stretch ourselves over the medium term and really bring the benefits of the 10 Year Health Plan to life.” Executives are therefore asked to begin to build out strategic commissioning narratives to focus on what strategic commissioning means for the local system and how it will be developed over the next three years; plans around neighbourhood care; whether changes to financial flows or payment are sought to help with delivery; and what more can be done at the centre to help drive pace of change locally. ICBs should provide a single document via regional teams to summarise the above points by 15 May.
The Scottish Government has published its five-year AI strategy to 2031 alongside an “AI Stack” detailing areas where action should be taken to ensure an effective response to AI as an emerging technology. By the end of the strategy’s lifecycle in 2031, the government hopes to achieve outcomes including equality of access “based on widespread literacy, trust and confidence in engaging with AI”, collective data stewardship and data sharing leadership to promote the safe use of data for good, embedded AI in critical national infrastructure to support public service delivery, and tech clusters and a pipeline of start-ups and scale-ups in national and international markets.
