Here are our entries for the category of Best Use of Digital for Community Care.
North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust
Overview: Turning a smartphone into a digital solution to impact improved clinical oversight of wound care.
Why? In North Cumbria, approximately 50 percent of the community nurse caseload is managing acute and chronic wounds, with a cost to the NHS of around £41.7m annually. This created a burden on the North Cumbria Integrated Care (NCIC) nursing workforce that it was unable to meet, due to a shortage of band five registered nurses.
What happened? Minuteful for Wound (MfW) digital wound management solution enables standardised assessment, measurement and documentation of wounds and monitoring over time. Clinicians complete a bespoke wound assessment using their smartphone and the AI-driven algorithms calculate automated wound measurements and identify the wound bed tissue types and give percentages of the distribution. With this reliable data, clinical teams can quickly identify deteriorating wounds and optimise care plans. MfW offers a ‘live caseload review’ portal to provide central access to wound data. This provides full visibility of the service-wide caseload to allow for early diagnosis and treatment, appropriate referral, MDT reviews and virtual senior/specialist review to support clinical decision making. It has demonstrated reduction in healing time, improved patient outcomes, greater empowerment of junior clinical staff to undertake assessments, a reduction in hospital admissions, and a reduced administrative burden for staff.
Looking ahead. By working in partnership with the Healthy IO fully, the team seeks to improve communication between specialists in wound care, increase equity of care and improved outcomes for patients across systems, and allow services including ED to access the digital solution for greater information sharing.
Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and RLDatix
Overview: Implementing community workforce scheduling software to support the delivery of community care at Midlands Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (MPFT).
Why? MPFT was using a paper system to create daily staff schedules and to allocate staff to patients. This paper-based, sometimes inaccurate process, had to be repeated on a daily basis, costing clinicians time on a labour intensive system that produced inefficient rotas, led to duplication of schedules, and was difficult to track or report.
What happened? MPFT chose Allocate eCommunity, rolling the software out to all 48 rostered units, totalling around 700 staff, to support their schedule creation and their delivery of care to their patients. From December 2023 to May 2024, it has helped MPFT schedule and complete 528,170 visits. The solution integrates seamlessly with the trust’s e-rostering tool, Optima, allowing for all information inputted in one system to be instantly and accurately updated. This saves MPFT on average upwards of 3 hours a month per administrator in each team manually inputting rotas on both Allocate eCommunity and Allocate Optima. Through Allocate eCommunity’s mobile app, MPFT’s district nurses can view their daily schedules and see information such as the estimated travel time to the next patient, their patient’s needs and acuity and even update their progress throughout the day. This provides the lead nurse with an overview of staff daily progress. In June 2024 MPFT have around 700 staff live on Allocate eCommunity which, when accounting for an average of 20 minutes saved on a daily basis, adds up to just over 233 hours saved each day across all clinicians.
Looking ahead. MPFT hopes to continue to realise efficiencies, improve patient safety, and save staff time through the use of the community workforce scheduling software.
Totalmobile
Overview: Totalmobile’s Carelink revolutionises community care by optimising service capacity, care plans, and scheduling.
Why? Care at home services play a vital role in enabling adults and older adults to maintain their independence and safety within their homes. However, the sector faces significant challenges, including lack of access to information, inefficiency in scheduling and planning, compliance and safety issues, and limited real-time visibility.
What happened? Fife Council adopted Carelink to revolutionise its Care at Home services. The solution was tailored to meet their specific needs, focusing on the integration of mobile workforce management with mobile access to support plans enabling the updating of records in real-time, scheduling capabilities allowing for the optimisation of staff visits, and real-time updates for managers on care delivery. The Council has achieved annual savings of £2.35 million from more efficient care coordination, reduced administrative overheads, and streamlined workflows. With 90 percent of scheduling now automated, the council has drastically reduced the time and effort required to manage schedules manually. A 50 percent reduction in missed care visits ensured that patients receive consistent, reliable care. Carelink’s digital platform ensured that service users’ information is securely recorded and easily accessible, and care workers were forewarned of any risks associated with service users, enhancing their safety during visits. A 35 percent increase in internal capacity means the Council can handle more cases without additional staff.
Looking ahead. By implementing Carelink, Fife Council and all our public sector customers using this solution have set a benchmark for the delivery of efficient, high-quality home care services. We believe Carelink is setting a new standard for the future of community care services.
Next up: browse entries for the category of Best Use of Digital for NHS Trusts here.
