Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has released its Green Plan for 2022-2025, detailing how they intend to work towards carbon reduction targets, reduce environmental impact and contribute to the NHS national target.
As part of the trust’s plan to ensure the provision of a sustainable model of care, one of its green plan actions is that the current offering of digitally-enabled care must be reviewed. The trust highlights a need to “create a strategy to utilise available best practice and technology that will increase the efficiency of operations.”
Moving on to explore digital transformation in more detail, the plan continues, “the trust has made significant progress in our use of digital technology, however we acknowledge that to continue the provision of outstanding care we must further the adoption and utilisation of new methods of care which utilise digital technology. This strategy will comprise one major tool in our aspiration to maintain person-centred care and will take advice from NHS’s What Good Looks Like framework.”
The plan highlights some of the actions relating to digitisation already taken to date, including the offering of digital consultations as an alternative to face-to-face; co-producing interactive care plans and records with service providers, carers and care professionals; and investing in software to enable remote working, which has significantly reduced physical paperwork and travel time. Additionally, implementing digital meal ordering for patients “has significantly reduced food waste as well as minimising the carbon emissions associated with meal delivery.”
Going on to lay out the intended actions going forward, the plan states how HPNFT will continue to utilise electronic technology when communicating with patients and GPs; to instil remote meetings and training in the first instance as best practice, to save on time and travel; and to progress the adoption of digital services such as video conferencing for service users and staff.
As well as improving and enhancing digitisation, the plan lists several other areas in which improvements and actions have been identified, including workforce and system leadership, travel and transport, and estates and facilities.
You can read the full Green Plan here.
