Sunderland uses e-SAP to unite health and social care data
- 15 March 2007
Sunderland Teaching Primary Care Trust has rolled out a new electronic Single Assessment Process system from Liquidlogic in an effort to standardise the assessment process for adult care across the Sunderland Health and Social Care Community.
e-SAP has been rolled out in partnership with City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust and Sunderland City Council and provides a coordinated way for health and social care agencies to assess the needs, and plan and deliver the care for adults, ensuring joined up working and avoiding procedures being needlessly duplicated.
A Sunderland TPCT spokesperson told E-Health Insider Primary Care: “The SAP project team at Sunderland TPCT are meeting these aims by delivering a new system that enables the many professionals involved in delivering care to record the information they need in an up to date single record and share it. This electronic SAP (e-SAP) system is available to both health and social services, allowing the electronic sharing of information across organisational and geographic boundaries.
“In the future it is intended that e-SAP will work in conjunction with the NHS Care Records Service and the Electronic Social Care Record. Staff have secure access to the patient records through smartcards that hold the information of the owner of the card and determine the level of authority to view, edit and update patient information. The smartcard will also enable information to be verified and shared using the NHS’s national data Spine service.”
They added: “The successful rollout of SAP and the e-SAP system brings a multitude of benefits for Sunderland’s adults using health and social care services including improved quality and convenience of care, person centred care and assessments, a single care plan, timely and effective discharge from hospital, involvement and support for carers and immediate treatment can be given in an emergency.”
The Sunderland TPCT SAP project team worked hard on preparing the community nursing staff. The district, specialist care and rapid response nurses, community matrons and administrators needed the IT skills necessary to use the system to record and share patient assessments accurately and effectively.
Karen Banks, SAP Project Manager for Sunderland TPCT, told EHIPC: “The SAP project team worked with the Sunderland TPCT IM&T Training Service to establish a comprehensive training programme. A two-step approach was developed, with essential IT training taking place first to equip nurses with basic IT skills, and then process and application training for Liquidlogic.
“The essential IT skills training was delivered through the European Computer Driving License (ECDL) qualification, an international standard which demonstrates that holders have reached a basic level of proficiency across a range of fundamental tasks. ECDL has been the NHS referenced standard since November 2001. The qualification is modular and learning can be undertaken in stages.”
As a prerequisite to attending the Liquidlogic for SAP training, staff were required to pass ECDL Module 2, ‘Using the Computer and Managing Files’ to demonstrate competence in basic IT skills.
Once they passed that, representatives from each of the 32 community nursing teams were trained and one person for each team was designated as a “Super User”, a Liquidlogic expert offering local support. Super User forums and review meetings were set up, and ongoing support in the workplace was available.
Pauline Hobson, a Business Change Lead on the project and a Modern Matron, said: “By working closely with the training team we could adapt the training to meet the needs of nursing teams. If we hadn’t worked that way I think we would only have got 10% of staff through training.”
Across the Sunderland Health and Social Care Community there are almost 1,500 e-SAP users and over 33,000 assessments have been made using the system since September 2006.
Banks said: “The rollout of SAP has been a great success across the trust, and system utilisation has increased dramatically over the past few months. A great deal of praise must go to the efforts of the nurses and project team involved in delivering the project, and their commitment to e-SAP as the tool to modernise and improve the assessment process in Sunderland.”
Business Development Manager at Liquidlogic, Neil Polson, told EHIPC: “The deployment of the system to such a large number of users was made easier by the fact that the system can be accessed via a browser and does not require any software to be installed onto the desktop PCs. The ability to access the system remotely via a wireless connection enables practitioners to carry out assessments and care planning whilst on the road.
“Practitioners across the health and social care community have been able to share assessment information instantaneously with other involved professionals working in different agencies. Furthermore, historic information held on the system can be used to plan for discharges by alerting social services and community staff to the likely care needs of an older person when they are discharged well in advance of the actual discharge date.”
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