Working in Partnership to Transform

Our partnership with Keele University is longstanding and extends into research on big data analytics and a national project for adult community health and social care services to avoid planned and unplanned hospital admissions.

A £6m Centre for Health Innovation in Stafford has significant potential for our regional health and social care economy. The Trust are actively seeking how we can drive regional collaboration through the university and offer opportunities for all.

The digital courses at the university have resulted in placements and MPFT tailored final year projects such as asset tracking systems, staff nomination voting systems and room booking solutions. We will look to build on this fantastic partnership in the coming years.

MPFT digital teams have taken a number of university placements from Coventry University which has resulted in opportunities for students, whilst also producing digitised service engagement systems and clinical research portals.

MPFT have expressed an interest in supporting placements for our future healthcare IT workforce through the nationally operated scheme, building on the success of our placements from the NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme in recent years.

Working in partnership with our People directorate, we need to keep addressing the national health and social care workforce challenge and help to reduce the vacancy gap through new digitally supported approaches to recruitment and retention.

Digital recruitment processes where appropriate, flexible working and remote working offers will all play significant roles in the recruitment drive of the Trust in order to bring in the right skills, no matter where the potential employee may be based or what the individual needs of the employee may be.

We will make sure we can support the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) through both reporting and support of recruitment opportunities through digital means to make it accessible and to reach wider and diverse candidates.

We will also continue improving our employee retention by making our Trust a fantastic place to work through ongoing collaboration, engagement and wellbeing support through digital means and improving our digital offers to staff.

We have a shared passion to equip our staff with new skills each year and encourage a culture of lifelong learning and development, especially when it comes to building digital confidence and competency in new systems and ways of working.

We will work to ensure that digital competency is assessed at recruitment, and through annual training and ongoing IT training and digital champions support approaches.

Digital engagement will play a huge part of the future with The Big Shout Out being a blueprint for success. Further engagement areas already under discussion are The Big Welcome, a digitised impactful and meaningful welcome for new staff to MPFT.

We will also continue to utilise and expand the In Our Gift community ideas platform, our wellbeing community and digital support packages and our social media groups.

Through network effects we can grow our MPFT Community, expand our connections, increase our collaboration and enhance our outcomes.

Some key areas of transformation focus over the coming years will be:

• Presentation of workforce data to appropriate audiences on live dashboards
• Digitised personnel files
• Alignment and potential integration of Allocate health roster data with the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) system for consistency and ease of management
• Further digitisation of workforce related forms such as the local induction checklist, the workplace risk assessment form and the return to work sickness form
• Digital engagement events: The Big Shout Out, The Big Welcome, The Big Soothe week
• Workforce Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chat Bot to simplify access to workforce related queries and processes

Security and privacy play a key role within any digital strategy and our Information Governance team working in partnership with us are essential in ensuring our systems and our data are kept safe and compliant in everything we do.

We will continue working with our IG colleagues on the management of information across the Trust through our robust governance and supporting processes. Our processes include the joint oversight and maintenance of key IG processes, including: 

• Caldicott Log for all systems with patient information
• Information Asset Register updates
• Development of Privacy Officer role and related processes
• Clinical Safety Case and Clinical Safety to Release processes
• Data Sharing Agreements
• Data Processing Agreements
• Data Privacy Impact Assessments
• Annual Data Security Protection Toolkit returns
• Ongoing systems audit and penetration testing
• Cyber Essentials accreditation support
• Supplier GDPR compliance and contract management support
• Third party access data agreements
• Fair processing campaigns for any new data processing requirements

The Trust’s dedicated Quality Improvement function are experts in the Virginia Mason Lean methodologies for process improvement, efficiency and service user focussed quality improvement approaches.

Following our foundational years of digital transformation, the focus in the second phase is on process, workflow and efficiency. These are areas where the expertise of our QI colleagues will be invaluable.

Through a close working partnership, MPFT Digital and our QI colleagues will:

• Collaborate on Rapid Process Improvement Workshops (RPIW) where digital innovation is often a key enabler to greater efficiency and a reduction in waste.
• Gain MPFT Digital certified leader experience in the QI Framework, and ensure reciprocal experience is in place for the QI team on our current and future digital systems.
• Key QI team activities such as Value Stream Mapping and Information Flow Mapping are often centred on MPFT processes which involve digital systems. Through collaboration and review of these Information Flow Maps, continual service improvement of our digital enabled workflows and processes can be enabled.
• Focus on the 8 flows of care in our digital systems design: the flow of service users, families & relationships, staff, medications, supplies, equipment, information and process engineering. Improving quality, communication and choice whilst reducing inefficiency.
• Jidoka QI principles are equally important to our digital approach, ensuring it is easier to “do the right thing”, separating machine work from human work with automation and autonomation in order to release capacity.
• The digital champions scheme is one of our key partnerships with the QI function, engaging our workforce with new digital innovative ideas and creating a peer support network to drive forwards the digital agenda.
• Working in partnership to ensure a standardised approach is adopted wherever possible, such as the virtual huddle board. This will aid support and training. 
• New processes enabled through digital systems will be continually updated in our Digital Toolkit, a list of systems, use cases and training materials.

The SSHIS are responsible for providing MPFT’s end user device and infrastructure support. They are a fundamental service to the daily operations of the organisation.

MPFT Digital have long worked in partnership with the SSHIS to improve our systems accessibility, performance and reliability, whilst also ensuring our devices and systems remain up to date and secure.

We will continue to collaborate closely on all areas of our IT to make continual improvements.

Over the coming years, the SSHIS’s ability to support and maintain the foundations of our digital infrastructure, device and service performance will be absolutely fundamental in the successful delivery of our digital strategy.

The MPFT Digital Transformation Plan outlines some key digital service and transformation objectives reliant upon our SSHIS partnership.

Through the creation of the MPFT Digital Strategy and Transformation Plan and the Facilities and Estates Strategy and Transformation Plan will align our capital approach and priorities.

Both strategies highlight the need to offer our service users and staff with choice.

Agile working approaches, flexible means of access to our services and areas of innovation in both estate and digital will be present in both strategies and will require joint capital schemes.

The MPFT digital and estates strategies will align priorities wherever possible on physical spend across the MPFT estate. Joint capital planning meetings will take place throughout the year to ensure these shared objectives become a reality.

The capital planning process will budget for digitally enabled and modern environments, embedding the use of digital technology to support service delivery in all new estates’ capital schemes.

A dedicated digital strategy theme on estates and digital, captures key areas of focus.

"The way we deliver services will continue to change and evolve and only by aligning the estate requirements with the digital solutions that will enable and support that change, will we truly achieve those high quality healthcare environments."
Michelle Evans, Programme Manager Strategic Transactions, Facilities and Estates

The finance department have been a digital exemplar within the organisation when it comes to adopting digital solutions and processes to provide a service.

The department has been 100% paperless in its requisition, purchase order and invoicing operations since 2014. We will continue to develop the FinTech agenda with the automation of all appropriate repeatable financial tasks.

The Trust’s NHS England and Improvement returns, as well as ongoing internal and external audit responses, are heavily reliant upon accurate monitoring and reporting of the Trust’s financial data.

“We need to know what the art of the possible is, finance will be measured in its ability to be reactive and proactive to the needs of the organisation. The way we capture data and integrate data at a macro level is key”
Glenn Head, Head of Financial Management, Corporate Services

Through ongoing development of the Trust’s finance systems, in partnership with MPFT Digital, we will support the finance transformation activities. This will be achieved through sharing real time transaction data on accessible dashboards to budget holders. We will provide live forecasts straight from the ledger to enable data driven financial decision making across the Trust’s budget holders. These same reports will be made available, where it is appropriate to do so, for external queries.

The finance team also work closely with MPFT Digital to support our national and regional funding bids and local business case processes. We ensure that the 5-case model of full business cases is adhered to and understood, the benefits and return on investment of any proposed investment case are made clear, and well governed through our Financial Effectiveness Groups (FEGs) and Finance & Performance Committee.

Through close partnership working with our procurement colleagues and our MPFT Digital Service Development function, we will work with our suppliers, both existing and new, to develop partnerships.

The suppliers of our systems will be managed and closely collaborated with so mutual benefit can be realised through the early adoption of new functionality to support improved clinical care.

We will continue to manage our contracts closely and review current infrastructure and service provision performance to ensure availability and value for money, security and suitability.

Functional specifications and compliant procurement processes will continue to ensure we get the right product, with the right service, and the right functionality, at the right price, every time we go out to market for new solutions.

With an ambitious digital strategy and transformation plan, but with limited resources and budgets, MPFT Digital need to collaborate with our services to research, implement, evaluate and fund digital innovation areas at pace.

We will support the impending research strategy where digital can provide enhancements, for example supporting “home-grown” research from within the Trust. We will also support the digital delivery of STARS (Supporting The Advancement of Research Skills) programme, a research training and development programme for MPFT staff.

By drawing on the expertise and resources within the Trust’s Research & Innovation department we can ensure we have robust evaluations in place where it is appropriate to do so.

Through research and benefits data, we will ensure faster transformation and innovation cycles, improving our chances of success in each and every transformation scheme through continuous learning, evaluation and ongoing data informed decision making.

Our innovation and leading-edge approaches mean we often start with small pilots to test concepts, feasibility and effectiveness. To mitigate ongoing financial risks these will be managed on limited contracts. These need to be tightly executed to learn, evaluate, reflect on improvements, test and validate.

If evaluations cannot prove sufficient benefit, the pilot against a limited contract will cease and a new approach will be sourced based on validated research data and reports to aid decision making.

MPFT Digital will consistently work with clinical and care colleagues, service user and carer involvement colleagues and research and innovation colleagues to baseline and formally appraise the benefits realised through MPFT Digital Transformation projects.

Each project where it is appropriate, will have baseline data capture periods defined. We will ensure we secure resources for evaluation and benefit review throughout any approved pilots.

We will ensure that there are clear goals and metrics in place prior to commencement of key transformation activities. Through this formal measurement, quantitative and qualitative data analysis and report out processes we will ensure our digital transformation schemes can evidence benefits realisation and the impact is fully understood.

We also work in partnership to support other research areas that the Trust undertake, ensuring that these are suitability supported from a digital perspective and the right infrastructure and systems are in place for a viable and successful research project to be undertaken.

The digital innovations within the strategy will also support the research and innovation team in many ways, for example, service evaluations. From our enhanced secure data collection regarding the people we service, this will support our research with more detailed and demographics and information. This is documented in further detail in the Data and Information theme.

We will support clinical research and work with partner organisations to improve the care experience for the people who use our services across the country.

“There is nothing more important than improving service user safety and getting better outcomes. We put our service users central to our digital needs.”
Neil Carr, Chief Executive Officer

MPFT Digital benefits from and supports the Trust’s Library and Knowledge Services.

Through joint review of respective strategies, it is clear that we have shared priorities and concerns that both strategies aim to address through digital means in the coming years.

The LKS strategy makes it clear that the vision and the mission for the function, to “connect knowledge and people, inform outstanding care, enable innovation and learning” will not be possible without a digital by default approach to the operation of the services.

Partnership, evidence-based decision making, better access to knowledge and research, improved skills and access to services are all mutually shared themes of both strategies.

Key areas of partnership working between LKS and MPFT Digital in the coming years will be:

• Service user access to digital technology
• Literature and evidence updates on assistive technology and technology related resources to aid continual systemic learning from research
• MPFT Digital staff learning and professional development
• Upgrade and expansion of LKS digital solutions to improve
• Access to internal knowledge
• Access and adoption of online resources (e-books, journals)
• Streamlined back-office processes, for example, registration of new staff to LKS
• Reduce environmental impact, including going paper-free
• Staff have reliable access to comprehensive range of library services

Supporting Staff to Support Service Users and Carers

“Current research and evidence was used to advise the library staff and Oak AHP Ward staff of the perceptual and cognitive aspects of dementia which impact on levels of engagement and potential functional independence.  The library team members sourced an increased selection of the ‘Pictures to share’ books and developed the reminiscence packs with wonderful items for use in therapeutic sessions” (Library Survey,2019)

Supporting Research

“I have utilized the library services regularly to help me with my Masters studies and to complete projects to improve patient care.” (Library Survey,2019)
 

Our partnership with MPFT’s communications function continues to play a critical role in how we engage with our services users, staff and external stakeholders.

For each digital update, whether new system, IT training offer, period of planned downtime, major incident or successful technology adoption news story, we need to ensure we continue to find the right medium, frequency and detail to make our digital communications as effective as possible.

Working with our colleagues in the communications function we will ensure:

• Appropriate communications plans for digital transformation are in place to ensure colleagues receive timely communications
• Communications are tailored and appropriate to the audience
• The Trust internal communications facilitates active and easy engagement
• Clarity for our workforce on all relevant digital matters
• Gain a greater understanding of our workforce communication preferences and continue to adapt  
• Ensure our service users, carers, workforce and wider stakeholders are engaged
• Ensure we have meaningful two-way conversations channels with our stakeholders, that we continue to receive feedback, collaborate and adapt

The pharmacy department are key digital innovation partners and an area of focus over the coming years with a dedicated digitisation programme in place.

We will make efficiency and safety gains through improved use of digital systems across all pharmacy areas. This includes pharmaceutical stock control, electronic prescription processes for community pharmacies and our local electronic prescription medicines administration services.

A key benefit of our pharmacy digital transformation is the contribution to our MPFT Green Plan.

“Our biggest wasteful processes are around blood/ECG results and handwriting reams of prescriptions every week (then delivering them to pharmacies). E-prescribing would be the single biggest capacity creator in community mental health settings.”
Michaela McAndrew, Mental Health Services Quality Lead Staffordshire

The Involvement and Experience team are fundamental for MPFT Digital’s ability to engage, collaborate and co-design our digital approaches with our service users and carers.

The service user and carer theme of the digital strategy details the need to continue to build meaningful and rewarding relationships with the service users and carers that we offer services to, ensuring that feedback is consistently and reliably obtained and acted upon.

Over the coming years, MPFT Digital will continue to work in partnership with the Involvement and Experience team to:

• Participate in the Service User and Carer Engagement Committee
• Build digital means of consistently capturing and reporting service user feedback
• Ensure that all teams, including MPFT Digital, can act on the feedback data captured to inform existing priorities and new areas of focus

The Nursing function has consistently been a close partner of the MPFT Digital team through our Chief Nurse/Director of Professional Leadership whom the function is accountable to, along with close working with our Chief Nursing Information Officer (CNIO). The MPFT Digital Strategy aligns to the ambitions of the Nursing Strategy 2020-2025, Nursing Into Action.

Through our partnership working, it is assured that the focus is always on service users and carers in everything we do. We will focus on how we provide care to our service users, the barriers to excellent care and the opportunities to improve our care through digital means are the focus of all conversations.

MPFT Digital services benefit from the insight and guidance on clinical safety, care priorities, operational processes, leadership approaches and communication and guidance advice for all areas of our digital transformation and service delivery.

Key areas of partnership working with our nursing colleagues are:

• Continued support of immunisations (Flu, COVID-19) and Testing (Lateral Flow) digital systems and approaches
• Deployment of a full Infection Control Management digital solution across all inpatient areas at MPFT
• Digitally enabled clinical supervision processes
• Priorities for integration and information of clinical information across systems and care settings

“Digital technology has the potential to help our service and to bring district nursing up to date. We do have challenges and barriers as does any service but the future is exciting with the new options available and innovations around the corner.”
Sam Anderson, Community Staff Nurse, 0-19 services

The Trust’s EPRR function is essential in the safe operations of our services in the event of any unforeseen event.

MPFT Digital’s partnership with EPRR ensure that our business continuity processes across the Trust and our digital disaster recovery processes are continually updated and matured as our digital maturity improves and our systems resilience, failover, back-up and restore capabilities are enhanced.

Through our partnership we take the time to understand where services are reliant upon potential single points of failure of digital systems, and what contingency plans and advice and guidance can be built into operational business continuity plans.

On an ongoing basis, the EPRR function share best practice advice and guidance with MPFT Digital on cyber security, business continuity and disaster recovery. They offer support on any significant planned transformation activities which may affect normal service operations across any part of the Trust.