The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust’s new in-house clinical IT system has won a national award for helping transform the way colleagues across the hospital and community provide patients with the right care at the right time.
The Trust’s SEPIA clinical portal achieved the ‘Enhancing Care By Sharing Data and Information’ Award at the Health Service Journal (HSJ) Awards, which for 35 years have recognised and celebrated the finest achievements in the NHS.
James Rawlinson, Director of Health Informatics at The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust, attended the ceremony on 23 November 2016 at the Riverside InterContinental 02 Hotel in London alongside colleagues Chris Holt, Richard Slater, Chris Birks, Joanne Mangnall, Helen Green and Andrew Clayton from Rotherham CCG.
He said: “It’s a fantastic achievement for all the hard work clinicians and IT teams have put in over the past two years to develop SEPIA. It’s a real honour and we’re incredibly proud to win.
“We developed SEPIA because community matrons told us they often spent a significant amount of time travelling to the hospital, visiting wards and making phone calls to help provide information to colleagues about patients. This new way of working means patients are treated more quickly and efficiently because they can see comprehensive patient information from any mobile device. We have been working with community nurses to develop SEPIA and they now say they couldn’t live without it.”
Hospital and community health services merged across Rotherham in 2013, which meant the Trust had an opportunity to develop new software to gather accurate, real-time information about patients.
Colleagues can now see patient demographics, including live views of Accident and Emergency attendees, lab results, admissions to hospital and discharge dates for patients across the community. Health professionals can access the information from desktops, laptops and hand-held devices with information spanning all departments, including A&E, theatres and community settings.
Access to the portal is controlled to protect patient confidentiality and to make sure changes cannot be made to patient records.
Andrew Clayton, Head of Health Informatics at NHS Rotherham CCG, also commented: “This is great recognition for Rotherham. A tremendous amount of work across health partners has gone into the portal which is helping to improve the quality of care for our patients by sharing information across the different services in our health and care community. We fully support the continued development of this system, it is a crucial part of our future plans to enhance patient care across GP, community and hospital services in Rotherham.”
You can see a list of all the winners on the HSJ website.
ENDS
For more information about the work of The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust, please visit: http://www.therotherhamft.nhs.uk/ You can also join the 4,000+ followers we have on Twitter @RotherhamNHS_FT or ‘like us’ on Facebook www.facebook.com/TheRotherhamNHSFoundationTrust.
Photo caption: LtoR – Richard Slater, Great British Bake Off star Sue Perkins, Joanne Mangnall, Chris Birks, James Rawlinson, Chris Holt, Andrew Clayton and Helen Green with presenter Beverley Bryant (Director of Digital Transformation at NHS Digital) at the HSJ Awards.