On day four of HTN Digital Week we welcomed Beth Lawton, Chief Digital and Information Officer for Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.
Beth opened the sessions telling us how they have responded to Covid-19 through digitising, virtualising and mobilising.
Beth explained how they increased VPN users from 125 to 4,000 + as well as moving meetings and training to online only, “we even had a clinician working from Turkey, as that’s where he was when we locked down.”
“There’s a lot that we have implemented that we will not go back on post-Covid.”
“We also set up a virtual mental health line”, Beth explained the health line was run from staff member’s homes through secure telephony.
Prior to Covid-19, Beth explained only a small number of teams were offering a very small number of virtual consultations and some teams were not particularly engaged with digital technology.
From the 16th March, the trust adopted Attend Anywhere and increased clinical leadership to manage projects.
“There were over 6,000 consultations in 6 weeks over the Attend Anywhere platform.”
The uptake of Attend Anywhere across the trust is broad and huge; Beth explained that nurses are the main users of the platform, but it is also used by social workers, psychiatrists and so on.
“We were using it for virtual consultations, MDT meetings, meetings with carers and patients, and ward consultations by self-isolating consultants. Things we didn’t expect was the platform being used for things like music therapy and yoga.”
“If you give people the right tools at the right time, they’ll run with those tools. At the end of that 6-week period, we were the highest users of Attend Anywhere in England.”
Beth explains that the main road to where the trust is based in Sussex is a constant traffic jam, and Covid has pushed staff to avoid wasting time in traffic and conduct consultations online.
“The key difference for us is the human factor; Attend Anywhere was relevant to clinicians’ needs and it was timely in delivering services efficiently and safely.”
“It was a good enough product; we spend a lot of time in the NHS in the pursuit of perfect, which can lead to a terrible sort of paralysis.”
“We gave people that framework to make sure your data is safe as a service user and your environment is safe as a clinician. It is a tricky balance to get that standardisation vs customisation.”
“We stripped out a hell of a lot of the bureaucracy. It’s about getting something out there and in use, then improving it from there.”
View the session here:
