Mid and South Essex Health Care Partnership (HCP), which covers all care sectors in the mid and south Essex area, has benefited from a digital system to support key worker COVID-19 testing.
An innovative bank shift platform created by consultant Dilshan Arawwawala, called Shift Partner, was extended in 5 days to be used, at scale, to manage staff testing. The platform is now available for all key workers and household members in the region.
The HCP COVID staff testing working group asked the Trust to establish a solution to support the programme and enable staff to quickly book in tests.
Dilshan Arawwawala said to HTN “On Thursday 1st April we had a call to discuss how we could use our platform Shift Partner, that supports organisations to publish and fill bank shifts, to support COVID testing, literally the following week.”
“We needed to understand and really focus on what we were trying to achieve in that short time period. The problem was staff were struggling to get testing and were going around the houses phoning people, trying to get swabs done at A&E departments and similar issues with obtaining results. I had recently developed symptoms and been tested, so fully understood the current pathway and micro problems that existed. We needed a scalable, intuitive solution, that removed as many manual steps as possible, to support large numbers of test requests across multiple test centres for multiple organisations. It had to provide staff with easy access to tests, automated return of results with guidance to support staff to safely return to work. It had to provide operational staff with a single solution to manage the entire COVID testing pathway.”
“We created a booking platform that is now being used across the region. To date it’s been used to process 4,000 COVID tests and we are now also including antibody testing. My own experience was a turnaround time, from symptom onset to results, of eight days. Introduction of the platform, along with other initiatives, has reduced this to two days.”
The system allows staff and household members with COVID symptoms to enter their details and book a test at one of the test centres. After swabs are taken, testing staff enter the results on the system and the person tested will get an automatic email containing their results along with health and return to work guidance. Those with a positive result will also receive a phone call from a member of the clinical team to discuss the result and any ongoing care needs. The platform also includes a user-portal, where upcoming tests and previous results are available.
Further iterations have also delivered, a fully customisable scheduler, multi-manager roles, clinical noting and mobile test centres. The team are currently working on integrating the platform into the regional health information infrastructure to produce a fully digital solution.
Dilshan added “It’s a really great example of collaboration between the Trust – clinical, operational, digital, and executive – and an SME (small to medium-sized enterprise) that’s home-grown, all pulling together in a very short time period to build something that’s delivering for regional key workers and their families. It also shows how digital can transform pathways and help solve large-scale problems for organisational leaders, operational teams and front-line staff.”
“A pandemic like coronavirus is a massive shock to any system. We understood that in order to quickly deliver care to those who most need it, we needed to think a little differently and take some calculated, proportionate risks – it’s about trying new things, communicating really well, and iteratively optimising solutions.”
