News

A new partnership to provide health and care staff with better and faster access to vital information about the person in their care is being established across the Yorkshire and Humber region.

At the moment, in many areas GPs and other care professionals are often not able to access crucial patient information quickly if it is held in another part of the health service – sometimes having to rely on post or fax instead.

A new collaborative, the Yorkshire and Humber Digital Care Board aims to address these issues by using technology and digital innovations to link systems across health and care organisations, enabling care providers to work more closely together.

This will result in the creation of a new Yorkshire & Humber Care Record, which will also provide citizens with access to their information and encourage them to be more involved in looking after their health.

On Wednesday 27 June, NHS England announced that Yorkshire and Humber is one of five areas chosen to become ‘Local Health and Care Record Exemplars’ (LHCRE). NHS England launched the LHCRE programme to reduce unnecessary patient tests and improve patient safety through better working between hospitals, GPs and social care.

Each new partnership will receive up to £7.5 million over two years to put in place an electronic shared local health and care record that makes the relevant information about people instantly available to everyone involved in their care and support.

Richard Corbridge, the Yorkshire and Humber bid’s Senior Responsible Officer and Chief Digital and Information Officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “This is fantastic news for citizens across the whole region. We have a great base on which to build thanks to work that is already happening in the area. We look forward to working together to integrate our services so that citizens can be confident that staff caring for them have all the information they need to make the right decisions.”

Lee Rickles, Programme Director and Chief Information Officer at Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust, added: “It is our ambition to give patients the best experience of care. We have a great opportunity to further develop the innovative work that is already taking place across the region to improve patient care through secure and transparent data sharing.

“It will also provide the building blocks to empower patients to take control of their condition by providing access to their own healthcare records.”

Dr Neville Young, Director of Enterprise and Innovation at the Yorkshire & Humber Academic Health Science Network, which is supporting the Yorkshire Health and Care Record programme, said: “It’s our role as an AHSN to ensure that innovations that can improve the quality of care for patients in the region are implemented at pace and scale. This programme shows what a great enabler a joined up digital system can be.”

Examples of successful integrated systems already working in the region include:

• Leeds Care Record: This is a joined-up digital care record which enables clinical and care staff to view real-time health and care information across care providers and between different systems. It is a secure computer system that brings together certain important information about patients who have used services provided by their GP, at a local hospital, community healthcare, social services or mental health teams.
• The Rotherham Health Record: This is an electronic system that provides health and care professionals with a summary of a patient’s existing records, including those held by a GP, hospital or social care provider.
• In the Humber region, an Emergency Department based multi-disciplinary frailty team use a shared record system to ensure patients receive the right care and support they need.
• Sheffield has implemented the Perfect Patient Pathway Test Bed, to create the ‘perfect patient pathway’ to bring substantial benefits for patients suffering from long term health conditions, such as diabetes, mental health problems, respiratory disease, hypertension and other chronic conditions. The aim is to keep patients with long term conditions well, independent and avoiding crisis points which often result in hospital admission, intensive rehabilitation and a high level of social care support.
• Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Calderdale & Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust have a full shared patient record across both Trusts, which is universally used by local clinicians.
• Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust (SHSC) is partnering Worcester Health and Care NHS Trust to partner with them as a Fast Follower under the Mental Health Global Digital Exemplar programme. SHSC’s application was well received by NHS Digital and following some minor changes to the overall plan is now progressing to the funding agreement stage. The programme will focus on developing open standards architecture, technology builds and blueprints to deliver digital capabilities that will enable better integration along mental and physical pathways for patients, mobile community based care, patient empowerment and the provision of population health data.
• Eight Trusts across Yorkshire have joined together to form the Yorkshire Imaging Collaborative enabling them to view each other’s imaging store to create a regional shared image record.
• Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust are a Lorenzo Digital Exemplar. Part of the role of an LDE is to integrate their electronic patient record (called Lorenzo and provided by DXC) between secondary care, primary care, community care and mental health services.
• Sharing the Yorkshire and Humber Helm patient held record with Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust Global Digital Exemplar.