Going further with Digital

This year, teams across the Trust are working on new digital projects which will revolutionise patient services, supporting digital transformation where it’s needed most and enabling patients to engage digitally with their care.

A new patient-facing health portal

Working in partnership with an external supplier called Wellola, this new solution will allow us to share information directly with patients using a secure digital platform, promoting patient selfmanagement. Patients will be able to view their clinical record, access support resources and share information on their health, which will be combined with data from other providers to create a single, secure electronic health record in PPM+. Leeds Hospitals Charity is supporting the project, using funds from donations and gifts in Wills to support the recruitment of specialist roles in the project team. The new system is expected to launch later this year.

Patient Appointments Hub

The Outpatients team is working on a new digital appointments portal called Patient Hub, which will allow patients to access and manage their hospital appointments using a smart phone, tablet or computer. This will reduce the number of DNA (did not attend) appointments, improve the patient experience when using our services and support our Net Zero (carbon neutral) promise, avoiding unnecessary printing and postage. The appointments hub is expected to launch in June 2022.

We’ll continue to maintain appropriate mechanisms for patients who are not digitally literate or unable to engage with these new digital services to ensure all patients receive high quality care.

Transforming Nursing Documentation

Converting paper-based forms is an essential step in digitising our hospitals, and we’ve recently launched a new project designed specifically to support our nursing colleagues, which will launch later this year. This will transform the majority of the 200+ paper care plan and assessment documents nurses frequently use, building them into a new digital solution within PPM+.

The new solution will change the way our nurses work, simplifying daily work and saving time. We’ll be able to complete care plans at the point of care, enabling quicker and easier decision making about the care and interventions individual patients require. The new solution will also allow us to collect information about the impact nursing care has on our patients, with an ambition to provide a live data feed for patient acuity, metrics and ward assurance data.

New Staff Intranet

Last but certainly not least, Spring saw the launch of our new Staff Intranet.

Accessible from home or work, and from any device, colleagues can log in using NHSmail details.

Our most recent internal communications audit showed that you’d like us to streamline the number of internal channels we use, reducing duplication and making channels more accessible. The new intranet will help us achieve all this, becoming our ‘go to’ place for all internal news and information. There’s lots of new features and functionality designed to support the way we work across the Trust - a fast, accurate search facility to help you find what you need quickly, and a clear A-Z. You can also set up a personalised newsfeed on your homepage, based on your team and the Trust-wide content you’re most interested in.

The old Staff Intranet will be decommissioned soon, and the Intranet team is working with colleagues across the Trust to make sure essential content is reviewed, updated and then transferred across. Please email the team if there’s content you’d like to include - leedsth-tr. intranet@nhs.net

These projects are just a few examples of the many digital projects the team is working on - find out more in the latest digital projects update.

PCAL Service diverts 48k patients to the right place for care

The Primary Care Access Line (PCAL) Team are getting patients directly to the right care, at the right time and reducing demand on highly pressurised services.

The Access lines, staffed by Registered Nurses and non-clinical coordinators, give GPs and other health professionals immediate, direct telephone access to acute services at our hospitals. PCAL team members work with referrers to complete thorough assessments using clinical judgement and approved pathways. They need an understanding of dozens of treatment pathways across multiple LTHT CSUs. Over the last year PCAL took fifty-nine thousand calls from GPs and Yorkshire Ambulance Service last year, twenty-six thousand more than the previous year. As a result, more than 48,000 patients were diverted from our Emergency Departments. Including almost 11,000 patients avoiding hospital altogether. PCAL’s stakeholder collaborations across the Trust have seen pathways rapidly added or adapted, to meet the changing and increasing demand. The team do this by working collaboratively with CSUs throughout the Trust to ensure that PCAL pathways are constantly developing to promote patient safety and experience. Twenty-eight specialties now have PCAL pathways. PCAL meet regularly with GPs across Leeds to consistently promote the service and understand the barriers that primary care services face and how the PCAL team can help. The team also work closely with Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS), including joint promotional days talking to paramedics as they arrive to increase the number of referrals from YAS crews on route.

Despite increased demand this year, the average time to answer calls has remained the same and abandoned call levels have reduced.