NHS Collaboration: Building a future for healthcare that benefits both patients and staff
Andy Kinnear, former NHS CIO and now Independent Consultant, reflects on how patients and staff can benefit from NHS trusts working even more collaboratively.
Many trusts recognise that it is no longer sustainable to deliver the pace of digital transformation necessary to improve patient care at the organisational level that the NHS has traditionally worked. It demands a significant financial investment and can be a complex undertaking to deliver across departments.
With increasing budget and staffing pressures, deploying new technology at this level is challenging. As a result, trusts are merging to help organisations of all sizes maximise resources and streamline new implementations. By consolidating teams and budgets, each trust can benefit from the economies of scale, while risks and successes can be shared through thoughtful collaboration. This shift towards collaborative leadership is already demonstrating that meaningful, system-wide change and digital transformation is achievable, as discussed in one of my previous blogs.
It’s true to say that for many organisations, taking a collaborative approach has not always come easily. Traditionally, NHS hospitals have worked independently, striving to provide the best possible care to patients in their community. However, as speciality departments have grown, each organisation has found itself providing care services to a wider area, making strict geographical boundaries less meaningful.
By taking a more collaborative approach, groups of healthcare service providers can provide a solid foundation to deliver the three key shifts that have been outlined in the government’s 10 year NHS health plan:
- Hospital to community: The NHS will transition care out of hospital-centric silos into locally integrated neighbourhood health services that provide continuous, accessible support closer to where people live and focus hospitals on specialist treatments.
- Analogue to digital: The service will move from outdated, paper-based systems to a fully digital model that gives patients real-time control over their health data and access to care through digital tools, including a transformed NHS App and unified electronic records.
- Sickness to prevention: The plan shifts the NHS’s emphasis from treating illness to preventing it by empowering healthier choices, expanding screening and vaccinations, tackling major risk factors, and working across society to improve population health.
By collaborating across trusts, organisations can share patient information and treatments to create more holistic care plans. We have started to see a positive shift in culture as we move to operating in a more open and collaborative environment, sharing best practices and project initiatives with colleagues from different organisations.
Group hospital networks facilitate stronger capabilities
This emergence of ‘Group’ hospitals working together has been facilitated by technology as well as the IT initiatives being deployed across different organisations.
Leveraging the Group resources, smaller organisations which may have strong capability in a particular field or achieved technology success, can shine by sharing their work with others in the Group. In this way, new practices can be adopted more readily, since they often have proven results that reduce the risks of new deployments.
Collaborating gives organisations the opportunity to innovate, become more mature in the use of their technology stack, and more consistent in their adoption and rollout.
A particular example is a Group of four hospitals that has benefitted from one organisation successfully implementing an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution, which has then been rolled out across the other trusts. The learnings and successes from the initial pilot and subsequent rollout in one trust have enabled swift deployment across the Group.
In this scenario, faster, easier access to patient data as well as the ability to share information immediately, from whichever department, works as well across different organisations as within a single hospital. It removes boundaries and opens new ways of working across teams. Many clinicians have espoused the benefits of being able to discuss treatments and outcomes with colleagues working in different institutions to provide better patient care.
Benefits of pooled resources for teams and suppliers
Pooling resources makes sense from both time and financial perspectives. For an IT project, this might mean one meeting with a vendor instead of four, with one contract that is easier to manage and one deployment programme that can be more easily executed.
From the supplier point of view, working with a Group also has benefits. Reduced time spent in negotiations, plans and contracts makes projects faster, smoother and less costly. The supplier can also pass on any resulting efficiencies onto the customers with discounted rates. And with more time to focus on ensuring the technology is deployed successfully, with high user adoption, this ensures that all the NHS parties get better value for money on their investment.
Attract and retain top IT talent with pooled resources
One of the issues for smaller trusts is attracting and retaining IT talent. Typically, with less IT budget, the smaller trusts are restricted on new investments, with funds focused on keeping systems running and less money available to develop new projects.
Working as a larger organisation enables new initiatives to be proposed and developed that can benefit the Group. Pooled resources, both financial and staff, provide the opportunity to initiate change with leading IT projects. This can also provide more career opportunities for IT staff, enabling them to work in bigger teams and with larger budgets. It can help trusts to attract and retain talent, which also means reduced costs in recruiting and training new staff.
Improved technology, better care
Ultimately working together, the goal should be that patients receive better care service. IT can be the vanguard for achieving this. It can drive collaboration to deliver technology projects that streamline working practices and facilitate the sharing of patient data across organisations.
From a practical level, by providing a single network, consistent login screens and one number for patients to call, the result is a cohesive service delivered by one group working together. Whether the IT solution is about shared electronic patient records or providing secure, managed access to data or systems, the public should ultimately get improved, joined up care.
A patient may receive the best oncology or orthopaedic treatment from the specialist hospital in the Group but provided by the smaller department that is their nearest centre. For clinicians, too, having access to the best possible facilities will help them to do a better job and increase morale and satisfaction.
By working together and maximising resources across trusts, everyone benefits.
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