Liverpool Women’s Hospital

Partnering with NHS England’s Future Connectivity programme, the trial uses portable routers with multi-SIM technology to provide fast, secure internet access in areas with poor network coverage. This ensures seamless access to patient data, improving patient care, supporting safeguarding efforts, and enhancing clinical efficiency.

By addressing digital poverty challenges, the initiative enhances care quality, saves time, and improves staff morale. With plans to roll out 44 devices, it offers a blueprint for nationwide adoption.

One of the three key shifts outlined by the government to underpin the NHS 10-Year Plan is a move from hospital-based to community-based care. As part of this priority, the Future Connectivity Programme is exploring how enhanced connectivity can better equip healthcare professionals to deliver quality care during home visits across England.

As a part of this target goal, we are working with Liverpool Women’s Hospital to explore their Bridge Health trial that will help Midwives and Genomics clinicians access medical data and records when providing care away from hospital sites.

Liverpool Women's Hospital is a major obstetrics, gynecology and neonatology research hospital. It is managed by the Liverpool Women's NHS Foundation Trust. The hospital receives approximately 50,000 patients annually and is the largest hospital for its specialism in Europe. Amongst the hospitals’ main offerings to the local community, the hospital provides a 24 hours a day 7 days a week midwifery service to the local community through their Midwife at Home teams.

These community midwives face significant technological challenges, including inadequate network coverage and unreliable connectivity, which interfere with their ability to access critical patient data and manage clinical risks.  These challenges are exacerbated by digital poverty in the Liverpool region, where access to reliable broadband services is very limited, affecting the quality and efficiency of patient care. Thus causes frustration to the HCPs, affecting staff morale.

The Nursing in the Digital Age report (2023), published by The Queen's Nursing Institute, is a good resource exploring these challenges and putting forward a set of recommendations to resolve.

This inconsistent network coverage and performance within the community poses significant clinical and operational risks, ranging from compromised patient safety due to incomplete records to inefficiencies in appointment completion and duplication of effort. There is an urgent need for a robust technological solution to ensure seamless connectivity and access to clinical systems for community midwives and genomic clinicians, wherever they may be performing their work.

The trust plans to alleviate this lack of connectivity with an innovative multi-SIM bonded portable router technology through ARO, an NHS-accredited specialist data center solution provider to Cheshire and Merseyside.

The solution offers fast, secure connectivity across diverse locations, making it an ideal candidate to address the connectivity gaps faced by community midwives. By partnering with ARO, who host clinical systems and manage diverse resilient networks, the trial aims to deploy an end-to-end solution that ensures reliable access to patient data in the community and enhances the overall quality of care delivery.

Expected benefits include:

Enhanced patient safety and outcomes: By ensuring community midwives and genomics clinicians have access to more up-to-date patient information, the trial will significantly enable the improvement of patient outcomes. With seamless connectivity to access real-time data the HCPs will be able to make informed decisions promptly.

Empowered safeguarding: Through improved connectivity, HCPs will gain the ability to be properly informed about potential issues within the home or family environment. This enhanced awareness will bolster safeguarding efforts, ensuring that visiting HCPs can effectively identify and address risks to patient safety.

Boosted staff morale and productivity: The implementation of reliable connectivity solutions will alleviate the frustrations caused by connectivity issues, fostering a more positive work environment. Improved morale among staff members will translate into increased productivity, as HCPs can focus more on delivering patient care rather than grappling with technical challenges.

Streamlined workflows and efficiency gains: Currently 30% of home visits cannot happen due to connectivity. With the elimination of the need to re-enter data, HCPs will experience substantial time savings, allowing for more productive interactions with patients. This efficiency gain will not only enhance the quality of care delivered but also optimise resource utilisation within the healthcare system.

The trust is will deploy over 40 bonded SIM devices this year distributed across clinical teams to achieve a representative sample of users. They have planned a robust testing and training regimen to allow the solution to be adopted quickly to the teams that will be using it.

We will be revisiting this trial when Liverpool Women’s Hospital has implemented the connected devices, and reviewing the benefits this new technology has brought to the trialist and could bring to the wider NHS.