The benefits of Wi-Fi roaming

Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) bring together local organisations to redesign care and improve population health, creating shared leadership and action. They are a pragmatic and practical way of delivering the ‘triple integration’ of primary and specialist care, physical and mental health services, and health with social care.

Technology is a critical enabler in achieving these ambitions. It will help clinicians use the full range of their skills, reduce bureaucracy, stimulate research, and enable service transformation. People will have more control over the care they receive and more support to manage their health, to keep themselves well and better manage their conditions, while assisting carers.

The NHS Long Term Plan describes how technology is continually opening new possibilities for prevention, care and treatment and it identifies practical priorities to drive digital transformation:

• create straightforward digital access to NHS services and help patients and their carers manage their health
• ensure that clinicians can access and interact with patient records and care plans wherever they are
• use decision support and artificial intelligence (AI) to help clinicians in applying best practice, eliminate unwarranted variation across the whole pathway of care, and support patients in managing their health and condition
• use predictive techniques to support local health systems to plan care for populations
• use intuitive tools to capture data as a by-product of care in ways that empower clinicians and reduce the administrative burden
• protect patients’ privacy and give them control over their medical record
• link clinical, genomic and other data to support the development of new treatments to improve the NHS, making data captured for care available for clinical research, and publish, as open data, aggregate metrics about NHS performance and services
• ensure NHS systems and NHS data are secure through implementation of security, monitoring systems and staff education
• mandate and rigorously enforce technology standards (as described in The Future of Healthcare) to ensure data is interoperable and accessible
• encourage a world leading health IT industry in England with a supportive environment for software developers and innovators

NHS transformation and the realisation of these benefits can only be realised if health and care professionals are able to access the applications and data that they need to do their job when they are working at their own setting, or the setting of another ICB partner.

In a NHS Digital survey, (requires NHS Futures account), NHS trusts and ICBs were asked to rank their reasons for implementing (or considering) a Wi-Fi roaming solution. The two highest priority reasons were for NHS staff moving between NHS sites, firstly their own staff visiting other sites and secondly visiting staff coming to their sites. This was followed by Local Authority staff visiting their sites, and then their staff visiting Local Authority sites. The fifth highest priority given was to provide connectivity for visiting ambulance staff.

It is vital therefore, that NHS and ICB Partners provide health and care professionals with the connectivity and digital tools they need to efficiently deliver safe and effective patient care, to enable staff to capture all health and care information digitally at the point of care, to optimise clinical processes to reduce administrative burden, to support the workforce to develop the digital skills they need to make effective use of these tools and mobile access to digital services to allow health and care workers to work more flexibly.

There are use cases to meet when providing a Wi-Fi solution. A summary of the use cases enabled by Wi-Fi roaming is included below.

Today’s health and care professionals work across many different settings and locations. The following section summarises the locations from which NHS and ICB partner employees need to access their own corporate networks and data via the Internet. The table is representative, there is a wide landscape of use cases and needs across many different environments, the table demonstrates how important it is to have the appropriate Wi-Fi roaming solution in place for use by NHS and ICB partners.

Table 3. The scope of wi-fi roaming (people, organisation and settings)

Source derived from from Wi-Fi roaming solutions: Guidance for NHS organisations, NHS Digital, 2022.

Today’s health and care professionals work across many different settings and locations. There is a wide landscape of use cases and needs across many different environments. Source: Derived from Wi-Fi roaming solutions: Guidance for NHS organisations, NHS Digital, 2022.