A note from Mandy, and a review of the year!
As most of you will know the NHS as a whole continues to operate within significant fiscal challenges, however, despite this we were once again able to deliver a financial surplus for our host; Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust (CHFT).
We started the year with an extremely successful go-live of the Cerner Millennium Electronic Patient Record (EPR). The support from THIS colleagues and all our customers continued as we focused on stabilisation and supporting Bradford Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (BTHFT) through their go-live and early live support during October 2017. The go-lives have been billed as the biggest, broadest and best in Europe; unique in that it was the first of it’s type where a single instance was deployed through collaboration across two trusts.
The Trust has already seen significant benefits in patient safety and care. The ability for all members of the multidisciplinary teams to view the patient record from wherever they are located has enhanced clinical conversations and decision making. We were also able to provide a link to GPs that allowed clinical professionals to view the EPR from all practices across Calderdale and Huddersfield. We are now working to deploy the Medical Interoperability Gateway (MIG) to allow our hospital clinicians to view the GP record with the intention later in 2018 to allow all local health and social care organisations to view the patient record in the same way.
THIS continued to ensure our data security processes were robust to keep our customer organisations as safe as possible. We were able to speak positively about the impact of the WannaCry ransomware attack in May 2017 where all services remained online and accessible. This is testament to the excellent processes and protocols we have in place; despite this we have continued to review and strengthen our internal and external processes. THIS has their very own certified IASME auditor and meet all the criteria under the Cyber Essentials scheme. The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) due to launch in May 2018 will present some challenges to all organisations. THIS are well placed having appointed a Data Protection Officer (DPO) in March 2018 making us already compliant against 9 of the 12 steps. Our track record on meeting the criteria for the three key ISO standards 27001, 20000 and 9001 has continued.
We have continued to work closely with the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) and the West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT). The most significant achievement being successful in a joint bidding process that would allow the expansion of the National Pathology Exchange (NPEx) hosted by THIS. The bid secured £2m to be spent over the next 2 years and will definitely benefit our local health communities.
The NPEx solution continued to strengthen as the subscribing labs stretched the boundaries of England as far as France. NPEx has now been recognised and selected by NHS England and Genomics England as a partner to support the National Genomics Information Programme throughout England.
Customer Service excellence still remained our top priority ensuring SLAs were delivered. Maintaining our current customer base is important to us. We continued to align our services to our customer needs to ensure we remain the supplier of choice now and as we move through some of the procurement processes over the next 12 months. We see the next 12 months as an opportunity to build on current relationships as well as developing new ones with partners and customers.
This year has presented THIS and customer organisations with challenge and opportunity and I believe this will continue well into the future; so as we prepare to move into 2018/19, I would like to thank all staff and customer organisations for their continued support and commitment, I look forward to the year ahead.
Published by Mandy Griffin on 08.08.2018.
This story first appeared in our 18th Issue of THIS is the news newsletter.
