Mid Cheshire Hospitals Foundation Trust: community connectivity challenges report
The trust
Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (MCHFT) is an acute hospital trust in Cheshire. The trust provides healthcare services to a population of approximately 300,000. Central Cheshire Integrated Care Partnership (CCICP) was formed in 2016 and saw the trust take on responsibility for providing community care services.
This report was commissioned by the NHS England Future Connectivity Programme and produced by Mid Cheshire Hospital Foundation Trust. The report details how the trust addressed IT infrastructure challenges to provide consistent, reliable connectivity and IT support to over 1,000 community care staff alongside cost savings of over £89,000 per year.
The challenge
When CCICP was formed, the trust faced 3 key infrastructure and connectivity challenges:
- Access to Mid Cheshire IT systems and services were not available at the sites where community staff worked.
- Mid Cheshire’s LAN (local area network) didn’t connect to GP practices, community hubs, patient homes, care homes, and staff home locations where the staff required access.
- The IT equipment staff had to use was old and not fit for purpose.
As a result, frontline staff didn’t have the connectivity they needed when visiting patients in the community so were unable to remotely update patient information and would need to return to a trust location to manually update this for the patients they supported. In addition, if a staff member had any technical issues, they would need to attend a main site to resolve a fault as IT staff were unable to remote support colleagues, reducing the amount of clinical time available to focus on patients.
To ensure the future sustainability of services to meet the demands of patients, the trust recognised the need to transform their IT support for community staff to:
- connect the existing infrastructure it had in place
- reduce the administrative IT burden of its staff
- save money
- free up critical clinical time available
The solution
The trust implemented a hybrid technology called Virtual Route Forwarding (VRF) to help integrate IT and telephony services, allowing the trust’s network to be made available, alongside but totally separated from the existing network, at the NHS and non-NHS sites where community staff worked.
This allowed staff to access the connectivity and network applications they needed to do their jobs at any site in the area.
As part of the work Mid Cheshire also improved connectivity by:
- refreshing the connectivity hardware at sites with aging infrastructure
- introducing software solutions and configurations to support seamless remote connectivity
- involving community staff in devices they used
As a result of this connectivity, staff supporting patients in the community no longer need to visit trust sites to update information or have technical issues resolved.
The trust has seen significant savings in the total cost of their network connectivity, saving £367,500 on year 1 costs, and £89,000 in ongoing yearly costs. Additionally the amount of mileage staff were completing reduced over 5 years, due to the use of appropriate devices, saving hundreds of hours of staff time and a total of £100,000 in mileage claims.
In addition, the trust has seen a reduction in the number of IT faults reported due to connectivity lose or failure of IT equipment, gaining valuable clinical time for patients.
The following pages contain a summary of the report content. The full report is available on the FutureNHS collaboration platform (you will need a FutureNHS or NHSmail account to access it).
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Last edited: 8 November 2024 2:52 pm