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NHS East of England
NHS East of England supports roll out of national Safety Express programme with Huddle.
NHS East of England (EoE) is the Strategic Health Authority (SHA) for the region, providing leadership to 40 local NHS organizations across Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Consequently, the SHA frequently has to collaborate and share information with geographically dispersed teams. With the launch of the national "Safety Express" Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention (QIPP) programme in 2010, NHS EoE recognised that email was no longer a sufficient way to communicate and turned to Huddle.
"Huddle ensures that everyone knows exactly what's happening on the project and efficiency has greatly improved. We have a few team members that are part-time and, when they're not in the office, colleagues can immediately pick up their work,"
- Lyn McIntyre, Head of Clinical Quality and Patient Safety
As the region's SHA, NHS EoE was tasked with recruiting 10 host organisations to participate in Safety Express, which aims to significantly reduce patient harm from pressure ulcers, catheter acquired urinary tract infections, falls and venous thromboembolism. Each selected host organisation then formed an improvement team of up to 10 healthcare professionals to work across primary, community, acute and social care within the region.
Once the local participants in the Safety Express project were finalised, NHS EoE's programme team stepped into its role as a coordinator for learning sessions, site visits and knowledge management. These activities strive to support frontline staff, enabling them to improve systems and provide better, simpler and safer care for patients.
"With such a large scale project to coordinate, we needed to be able to share documents with team members without filling up people's inboxes and causing confusion over document versions," explains Lyn McIntyre, Head of Clinical Quality and Patient Safety, NHS East of England. "As the people involved in the programme are based at various locations, we also needed conferencing facilities so we could avoid the time and monetary expense of in-person meetings. What we really wanted was a system that could do everything."
Members of staff across NHS EoE were already using Huddle for a number of other projects. Due to Huddle's ease of use and the fact it could be accessed from anywhere, at anytime, the decision was made to integrate it into the Safety Express programme from the outset.
"Huddle is a progressive and efficient way of working. When I try to collaborate with colleagues that aren't using Huddle, I think 'I just need to get them Huddled!'"
- Lyn McIntyre, Head of Clinical Quality and Patient Safety
Lyn explains: "As Safety Express was a completely new workstream, there were no established ways of working already in place. Other than email, Huddle wasn't replacing any tools or services, so people became accustomed to using it from the project's start. All project communication is done via Huddle."
More than 100 people involved in Safety Express now have access to all the information they need in one secure place. Department of Health (DoH) papers, policy documents and articles are uploaded into a resource workspace. As soon as new papers are released, people no longer have to visit various web sites for information, they just log into Huddle. Development plans, key project dates, details of DoH site visits and workshops are also instantly accessible.
"Huddle ensures that everyone knows exactly what's happening on the project and efficiency has greatly improved. We have a few team members that are part-time and, when they're not in the office, colleagues can immediately pick up their work," Lyn continues. "I no longer have to worry about version control when there are a lot of people contributing to documents. Thanks to Huddle's audit trail and comment functionalities, we always know exactly who gave what feedback and what updates have been made to content. As a manager, it's also extremely useful to receive notifications on what has and hasn't been done. "
Huddle will continue to be used following the NHS restructure, which will see the functions provided by the DoH and SHAs combined, so the NHS EoE does not have to worry about migration to a new system. The SHA hopes to streamline other projects by using Huddle more widely.
Lyn concludes: "Huddle is a progressive and efficient way of working. When I try to collaborate with colleagues that aren't using Huddle, I think 'I just need to get them Huddled!'"
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