Next steps

As a trust, we are continually looking at improving the IT experience for our staff. Within the community, connection issues still present us a challenge, especially for teams who provide services directly to patients.

Community staff currently use EMIS Web as their main Electronic Patient Record, and with staff moving away from tablets this restricted our use of the offline functionality as the laptops operating system didn’t support this. However, EMIS now supports offline functionality for EMIS Web on Windows, which opens up the opportunity for our staff to use this on their laptop devices.

We are currently looking to trial this approach, initially with a few users, to see if this offers an alternative solution to the loss of network connectivity.

The emergence of new technology is also something the trust are reviewing. Although prohibitively expensive now, satellite internet connections may prove more stable and accessible in providing connectivity than the traditional mobile networks in the future.

The use of multi provider SIM cards is also a potential avenue for investigation. However, this would mean the trust would have to have a service contract with multiple vendors, which in the current financial climate would be difficult to justify the expenditure.

The renewal of the trusts devices is due this year. As part of this work, the trust will complete a market test of the latest devices with staff to make sure we continue to get the right device for our staff.

Finally, the Trust undertook a staff survey recently. Although the take up of the survey was poor, there were some themes for us to focus on moving forward.

We found that:

• 3.79 out of 5 was the average rating for how staff rated the network connectivity on their devices, which in the main is positive
• network connections when staff are at home seem to be the most stable, followed by office locations where in the main the connection is good
• as expected though one area where feedback is poor on connections is when staff are at non NHS locations or patient homes (4G connection), the feedback is mixed for these areas
• a high percentage of staff do feel though that they have the right device for the job, which again is a positive reflection on the work the trust has done
• from the areas that need to be improved, battery life on devices is one area that stands out where we need to analyse further, as well as signal dropping issues