Salford Council adopt new loan management software

Salford City Council’s integrated community equipment service (ICES) has chosen Ethitec’s ELMS2 software to manage all the wheelchair and equipment loans made in the trust.

ICES is a DH-funded initiative across health and social care to develop community equipment services in England, remove unnecessary barriers for users and modernise services. 

The mission of the ICES Team is ‘to support and encourage the development and integration of people centred equipment services for the enhancement of health, well being and independence’.

Ethitec’s ELMS2 software is a modular multi-user system which provides support for the provision of medical aid equipment to people living in the community. The system supports the ordering, stock management, purchasing, asset management, distribution, and collection of community equipment, aided by full support for multiple stores, wheelchair services, third party system links, barcoding, and web based access and ordering.

Designed to meet the specific needs of wheelchair and equipment loan stores, ELMS2 enables the management and triage of referrals into the service, coordination of clinics and appointment waiting lists, as well as the scheduling of new appointments and follow-ups.

Since its implementation at Salford, Ethitec claims the ‘ELMS2 has helped to improve patient care by driving down wheelchair waiting lists and increasing communication between services.’

Salford ICES’ operations manager, Pete Sandiford, told E-Health Insider Primary Care: “We set up a project to have a look at new systems and did a tender for the intent to supply. We eventually chose ELMS2 after my administrators worked with the system and decided that it was the best choice for them.”

Most recently Salford ICES has devolved wheelchair service provision from regional down to local level, providing the services from one site.

Ethitec’s commercial director, Simon Taylor, told EHIPC: “Historically, wheelchair services and ICES have been separate services, even though they are very similar services. With Salford, the ICES have been a customer of ours for a number of years and they decided to bring the two services together and migrate the wheelchair service to the ELMS2 system.”

Salford’s wheelchair service manager, Barbara Boland, added: “ELMS2 provides management information far superior to anything we have had before. We can pull off regular reports on referrals and assessments, enabling us to allocate time more effectively.

“For example, a series of 45 minute appointments can be redistributed to relieve pressure on 30 minute clinics, if the waiting times for these are greater.”

Salford claim that the shared system improved communication between services and the extensive reporting functionality increased the efficiency of appointment allocation. Assessment, clinical and staff activity data can also be collated in an intuitive ‘workflow’ based manner that will closely match the working practices of its clinical users.

Taylor added: “ELMS2 was written 18 years ago for the British Red Cross Community Equipment Service in Leicester. Since then, we’ve been constantly developing it to make it the ideal solution for equipment and loan management. It offers a more clinical view, provides a better patient service and is more reportable for managers who need to produce service reports.

“Using ELMS2, staff can keep track of their equipment and can create update complete patient records of patients using wheelchairs or other equipment from the ICES store.”

Sandiford said that the new shared system has made checking stock supplies a lot more transparent.

“We have developed ELMS2 since going live and with the addition of the wheelchair service it’s made our work a lot easier. We can now look at the custom we get and the whole service becomes more transparent for the ICES team. The next step from here will be the creation of an online catalogue for our goods.”

Mike Weatherall, ELMS2 product manager, added: “A growing number of ICES stores are bringing wheelchair service provision under one roof. Designed to support equipment, wheelchair, prosthetic and orthotic services, ELMS2 offers a simple and reliable IT solution to facilitate service integration.”

Sandiford said: “We ran on a mainframe system before this, but now we can meet government targets in track and trace. We’re up to 90 per cent with that, which is great and the system helps me out with producing reviews and demonstrating our best value.”