Connected Care

We will enable greater choice to empower service users and carers to make better decisions, and make it easier to interact with our services and access information about them. We will have easy to use, accessible and reliable systems and equipment, with flexible alternatives when digital is not suitable.

We will encourage better wellbeing, independent living and improve prevention for our people. We will have digitally enabled care pathways that offer clearer advice and guidance for how to access online health promotion, self-management support materials, e-therapeutic platforms, community service sign-posting, self-assessment services, self-referral options and wellbeing apps.

We will make sure our new digital ways of working do not create extra difficulties for people. Everyone who needs it will be offered assistance, so they are able to take advantage of digital where it is suitable. We will tailor our services based upon people’s digital preferences for communication, their capability, accessibility and individual needs including protected characteristics.

We will ensure all our buildings are compliant, effective, and exceed the expectations of all users. Our estates will be eco-friendly, easy to get around through digital signage, and wireless enabled for both entertainment and keeping in touch.

We will ensure people have the right education and skills to use the digital systems available to them. We will make sure that confidence and competence are not limiting factors when it comes to using digital technology for health and care. We will support service users to use systems with training sessions, guides and videos.

We will digitally enable our care pathways to be delivered remotely, with self-care and health monitoring options. Our community support services can be improved through greater use of digital to reduce the need to travel, increase independence, help people manage their conditions better and offer flexibility to our service users and carers.

Our staff need to have the right level of skills and confidence to use the devices and systems available to them. We will ensure the systems we use have training available, are accessible and inclusive.

We will make sure that our staff know about our digital systems, what the latest developments are and they receive news on the latest opportunities to collaborate.

There is power in data, and we will empower and inform our service users, staff and partners with the insights it provides. Our data reporting will progress from describing what has happened, to predicting improvements we want to happen for future priorities.

We will enable our staff to work from where they can provide the best care and be most productive. We need to provide collaborative office space, bookable hot desks and systems and equipment to allow people to work from home and in the community.

Engagement is vital to continually improve how we deliver our services, and we will make sure there are many ways for service users and carers to submit feedback to inform future improvements.

We will connect our service users and staff to reliable networks, devices and systems. We make sure all data is private and secure and used or shared safely for the purpose of care only.

Digitised care pathways are built by workflows that guide service users and staff through a process. Digital automation, alerting and tasks are critical to be efficient, using improved systems and removing our reliance on paper.

We need to ensure our care plans are accessible for our service users, sending letters digitally and our service user request form and feedback processes are digitised where possible

Our own internal staff correspondence needs to be sent digitally by default, ensuring less wastage and greener methods of communication are adopted across the Trust.

Our peer-to-peer support group, the Sustainability Champions, continue to meet and share ideas on reducing the Trust’s emissions and use of non-renewable materials as part of the MPFT Green Plan.

There is still a lot of paper correspondence between MPFT and our partners in health, social care and specialist services across the Country.

Through ongoing digitisation of records and forms, we need to ensure that legacy care processes still reliant on paper are digitised wherever possible.

Through COVID-19 our organisational travel and expense claims dramatically reduced as our staff have worked in new agile ways. Where suitable this agile working approach needs to be maintained.

Through continued use of digital solutions such as video consultations and Microsoft Teams, plus increased use of remote monitoring solutions, digital therapeutic apps and wearables, we can continue to rely less on travel and keep our MPFT carbon footprint to a minimum.

We will collaborate with all staff, especially clinical and care teams, estates and quality improvement teams to ensure the Trust’s sustainability ambitions are considered in all new service processes and care pathways with a Sustainable in Quality Improvement (Sus QI) approach.

Sustainability is everyone’s responsibility, and through digital technology, we will ensure we enable a greener MPFT.

Through building our sustainability approach into our commissioning and procurement practices we can ensure that any supplier the Trust uses also aligns to the Trust’s sustainability objectives.

Suppliers will be challenged on their carbon footprint statistics, ensuring any hosted systems providers meet the carbon-neutral ambitions of our Trust.

This will be in line with the NHS ambition to reach net zero by 2045.

We will work with Estates to create consolidated management and information reporting of all our premises utilities.

Through deployment of centralised Buildings Management Systems (BMS) we will create dashboards of efficiency and energy utilisation across all our premises to help inform daily changes, for example, thermostat settings, to long-term strategic decisions, for example, insulation, solar fitting or even rebuild.

Renewable energy sources, digitised pathways, reduced travel, more efficient buildings, connected data platforms, reduction in local data centre usage, recycling of legacy equipment, are all of consideration for the digital strategy and MPFT.

With every new project and transformation activity we will assess its green credentials, to ensure we stay green.