More Barnsley Hospital staff switch to System C care coordination app

More clinical staff at Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust are now performing digital handovers using a care coordination app.

Since the trust started using System C’s CareFlow Connect app, usage has increased month on month, with almost 30,000 handovers completed in November.

The technology integrates with Barnsley’s CareFlow EPR to provide staff with a patient’s full information on mobile devices, complete with notes that are updated in real-time by multi-professional teams and date/time stamped to create a robust audit trail. It enables a patient’s vital information to move with them between departments, ensuring a safer and quicker transfer of care between teams.

The trust’s chief clinical information offer (CCIO) and consultant gastroenterologist, Dr Dominic Bullas, said: “We’re very pleased with how staff across the trust have adopted Connect. The maternity department went live in June, and the midwives have fully embraced it.

“We’re now working on rolling out the system beyond the hospital to our community midwives and introducing further Trust-wide functionality with alerting, task management and communications.”

The latest areas to go-live with the system in November 2021 included the acute response team, two surgical wards and same day emergency care (medical and surgical) department.

Chief nursing information officer (CNIO) at Barnsley Hospital, Stacey Hatton, said: “Once we are live with CareFlow Medicines Management, we will also be using Connect to manage internal referrals, with a view to piloting it with our Speech and Language Therapists, as it will help to increase efficiency and improve outcomes.

“In terms of digitising working practices, Connect is a big step forward for several reasons. We have streamlined our handover process and standardised the format, it’s helped the trust move away from paper, and is contributing to our information governance.”

Before moving to the collaboration system, staff printed handover documents that were made using Word and stored on a shared drive. If a member of staff added to the handover, it wasn’t always clear who had entered the information and a new handover would have to be created each time a patient moved into a different area in the hospital.

The roll-out of System C’s Careflow Connect is the latest implementation in the trust’s comprehensive digital transformation programme in partnership with System C. Last year, Barnsley ditched Lorenzo’s EPR and replaced it with System C’s EPR, becoming the first trust in the country to move away from Lorenzo, which was bought under the centralised National Programme for IT.

Markus Bolton, joint CEO at System C, added: “Barnsley is making big strides towards its digital objectives to benefit patients and improve working practices. It’s a great trust to work with and we’re looking forward to introducing Connect for other workflows.”