Newham council tracks health equipment
- 8 June 2007
The London Borough of Newham’s integrated community equipment service (ICES) has chosen Ethitec’s ELMS2 software to manage all the loans made from the council’s social services team, including web-browser access for the first time.
ICES is a DH-funded initiative across health and social care to develop community equipment services in England, desigend to remove unnecessary barriers for users and modernise community equipment services.
Newham ICES delivers equipment to residents of the borough who are both social service users and patients of the PCT. In terms of the equipment, they deliver all the normal occupational therapy and pressure care items such as seating as well as plastics/disposables (such as needles, tubing for feeding/medication).
Newham’s ICES manager, Mark Ellmann, said: “The decision to switch systems is never taken lightly. However, when we had cause to, experience had taught us that it was important to review the supplier and service as well as the system. Ethitec were open and honest, giving us every client name on their books to contact for a reference. This gave us confidence in them from the start and was proven in the quick and painless migration they delivered.”
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.
The council wanted a system that would not only provide D54 statistics, an overall indicator for community equipment used by the ICES, but also for detailed reports on who has borrowed which stocks, and what needs returning by a certain date.
Ethitec’s commercial director, Simon Taylor, told EHIPC: “ELMS2 provides ICES’s with a software that can help create the management information they need. The built in system can prepare many reports and ELMS2 has helped to improve patient care by driving down waiting lists and increasing communication between services, based on D54 statistics.”
Ethitec were able to migrate the system over to ELMS2 in less than a month. Ellmann said: “ELMS2 is incredibly easy to use. The whole team has welcomed the ability to create more detailed reports, as it gives us greater insight into store performance and areas to improve. As the system is so flexible, we can pretty much customise any report we want – at the click of a button and without incurring any cost.”
The ELMS2 system will also provide Newham with audit reporting facilities and will have web-based functionality so anyone authorised can add to the system from a remote location.
Ethitec first created ELMS2 in 1990 as a bespoke application for the British Red Cross Community Equipment Service in Leicester. It is now used by 52 of the 130 ICES’s in England and Taylor says the company ‘likes to think it is the most functional system for bringing together health and social services.’
The company are now working on making the system available to patients so that they can organise online delivery of items themselves. Currently, only PCTs and the ICES staff have access to the system, with occupational therapists making the majority of bookings.
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