Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust has reflected on achievements from 2025/26, highlighting work on quality, access, and innovation, and “significant, evidenced improvements” to services for families.
Efforts to improve clinical record keeping are delivering safer care, higher-quality documentation, and better efficiency, the trust states, with a “high engagement approach” taken to embedding changes, involving site walkarounds led by the deputy medical director, CNIO, and associate director for health records.
The full roll out of the Careflow Narrative EPR has helped to improve access to real-time patient information, reduced duplication, and strengthened auditability, according to Sheffield Children’s. Refreshed nursing quality dashboards are promoting improvements in record accuracy and compliance with ID bands and allergies, and digital care plans and assessments are supporting more personalised and proactive care, with earlier discharge planning and a clearer understanding of patient needs.
Power BI dashboards and digital reporting are credited with enabling timely performance insight and supporting evidence-based clinical decision making, whilst integration with the Yorkshire and Humber Care Record is supporting information across organisations for continuity and safety of care. The trust also highlights the positive patient safety benefits achieved through daily reports on the delivery of electronic observations provided via mobile devices using the Brigid App.
Elsewhere, the board reports on research and innovation work, including the delivery of the National Centre for Child Health Technology, set to open in summer to focus on advancing child health technologies. The trust’s commercial research delivery centre, which has just celebrated its first anniversary, has also received further investment from the NIHR. “To develop our early phase translational research capabilities, we are working closely with partners across Sheffield on a Biomedical Research Centre bid, with children and young people a key theme,” SCFT notes.
“2025/26 has been successful year for Sheffield Children’s and we are hugely grateful for the contributions of each and everyone one of our over 4000 colleagues, patients, families and partners in working together to deliver healthier futures for children and young people,” the board shares.
Wider trend: Digital in children’s health
Earlier this year, we caught up with Daniel Ray, CTO at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, to learn more about what went into the development of the trust’s new digital strategy, covering key points, ambitions, and hopes for the future. “BWC went live with Epic in May of last year, which was an unbelievable feat that was three or four years in the planning and a huge team effort, but it has been a massive leap forward in our digital and data setup,” he said. “The last five years has been about doing the groundwork and improving our infrastructure, and the strategy is going to help us with where to go from here.”
NHS England has published a preliminary market engagement notice with a total value of up to £110 million, hoping to inform the future of children’s digital health services. Ambitions are to modernise services including the child health information service, antenatal and newborn screening programmes, and a digital alternative to the Red Book. The wider vision, according to NHSE, is to develop a suite of digital and data services to support preventative health and care services for children, requiring “an approach that does not just digitise processes, but rethinks healthcare delivery to support changing behaviours and lifestyles through information, advice and support, drawing on understanding of motivations and behaviours, and tapping into the potential of new technologies, including artificial intelligence”.
NHS England has awarded a contract with a value of up to £1.5 million to Digibete C.I.C. for a national digital education platform to support children and young people with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. The contract is a call-off from a framework agreement, set to run from May 2026 to May 2031, for a total period of five years. The platform is described as “universally available”, designed to host condition-specific content to promote self-management for children and young people living with the condition.
