Meet the NUH Digital Nursing Team that has been shortlisted for a national award
A forward-thinking team of nurses at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) has been shortlisted for a national award for its work in boosting the use of technology within Nottingham’s hospitals.
The Digital Nursing team at NUH help to bridge the gap between the digital world and clinical practice. The team was enlisted in 2017 and is now employed on a full-time basis within the Trust’s ICT team to help pave the way in NUH ambitions to become a ‘paperless hospital’.
A team of six, the Digital Nurses ensure that clinicians have a key role in future digital innovation at NUH and work hard to make sure that any new technology is clinically safe, effective and efficient.
The team have helped to introduce a whole new generation of digital tools to NUH, starting with the development of digital nursing and midwifery assessments. It is this initiative that has seen the Digital Nursing team celebrating this week, as they have been shortlisted for a prestigious Public Sector Paperless Award for their work. Held annually, the Awards honour those organisations that are making waves within digital transformation.
On admission to hospital, nurses and midwives have traditionally evaluated patients’ needs by completing numerous assessments by filling out paper booklets. These booklets contained up to 28 pages, with each being used to assess every patient upon admission. Longer-stay patients might have required multiple booklets, with some assessments repeated numerous times throughout the patient’s stay.
Working closely with numerous colleagues within ICT, the team developed 17 individual electronic assessments, two of which went live in over 70 adult inpatient wards in June 2018. The remainder of the assessments then went live in September 2018 and are completed through the Nervecentre software, which is readily available to clinical staff.
For the Digital Nursing team, it was important that the digital documents were completely useable for clinical staff from the offset, as well as being fit for purpose for patients across the whole Trust. In the development stage, those working on the frontline were regularly asked to feedback their thoughts on how the digital assessments could work best for them.
Tracey Warren, from the Digital Nursing team, said: “Whether we like it or not, we’re striving to become paperless across nursing and midwifery and we needed to get it right, especially for the staff on the wards so that the patients can get the right care that they need. We had to make it spot on for those who would be using it every day and that was a massive challenge, but we made sure that we spoke to lots of staff to get feedback and worked closely with the leads for the individual assessments to make sure that we got them fit for purpose.
“The information is more visible and accessible now - and you don’t have to waste time having to decipher handwriting!”
Other benefits include improved information and communication, as patient data can now be recorded electronically in real time, with multiple staff able to access the information at the same time. The initiative has also helped to free up staff time compared to the paper version of the assessments.
Whilst the initiative is in place across all adult inpatients, the next steps for the Digital team are to develop equivalent documents for Critical Care and Children, as well as developing further standalone assessments.
Asked about her team’s Award nomination, Tracey said: “I’m so pleased to have been shortlisted! When you’re working really hard and in the thick of it, it’s nice to have that recognition. It’s taken lots of hard work and it’s been time consuming, but the whole team came together, along with ICT, to get this project to where it is now.”
Ann-Marie Riley, Deputy Chief Nurse, said: “A key requirement from the initiative was to design a digital solution that was easy for nurses and midwives to use. The electronic nursing risk assessment initiative is a great example of how clinical team and ICT can work collaboratively to design an excellent platform that can be successfully introduced at scale across nursing and midwifery. I am incredibly proud to have worked with the digital nursing team and ICT colleagues on this project and am looking forward to starting the next phase of this work.”
The winners of the Public Sector Paperless Awards will be revealed on 11 July 2019, in Manchester.