In March 2020, a business case to extend the use of the solution to all remaining acute areas and to consolidate across community, mental health and learning disability inpatient areas was submitted as part of the response to COVID-19. This business case was supported by a number of local and national strategies including:
- Scotland Digital Health and Care Strategy (2018) domains of service transformation and workforce capability
- NHS Fife’s Digital and Information Strategy (2019-2022), which recognised the importance of conducting bedside risk assessments, and identified this as a key deliverable of their ambition to digitally deliver joined up care
- NHS Fife’s clinical strategy guiding principles of patient centred and equitable care and the joining up care strategy which recognised the importance of sharing of key information when patients are transferred between a community inpatient area and an acute inpatient area
The business case was successful and an enterprise wide agreement was reached with Alcidion which allows provision of both hard alerting and track and trigger across NHS Fife. Rollout started immediately on 8th April 2020 with three community in patient areas. The project followed a rapid rollout delivery model with training facilitated using remote screen connect software. A range of new user accounts, configuration of new service areas and reports were also created.
Between 8th April 2020 and 27th August 2020 an additional 42 inpatient wards and day case areas went live with observation capture and use of the assessment tools. This included provision across six community hospitals (including one with three mental health wards); two mental health hospitals and one learning disabilities hospital. 450 staff were trained remotely with many areas also cascading training to their staff.
In partnership with Alcidion, the Scottish Paediatric Early Warning score (PEWS) was built as a new assessment. This was tested and validated by the service before going live on 10th August 2020. This was an excellent achievement with only four months from specification to implementation.
A second phase to implement hard alerting is now being progressed alongside some remaining specialty acute areas."
