Alder Hey’s vision to create the best experience and outcomes for children, young people and families

Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust is a provider of specialist healthcare to over 330,000 children and young people each year. In addition to the hospital site in Liverpool, Alder Hey has a presence at a number of community outreach sites. The Trust also provides inpatient care for children with complex mental health needs. The Trust employs a workforce of 4,115 staff and, as a teaching and training hospital, there are around 900 medical and 800nursing and allied health professional students each year.

What were their aims?

Following the successful delivery of the Digital Futures strategy, the Trust has now embarked on the latest ‘Digital and Data Futures’ strategy, which aims to offer exceptional care and experience to patients and families, supported and enabled by digital technology. The strategy focuses around four key themes:

1. Digital Children, Young People & Families - New Models of Care.
2. Outstanding records and safe systems.
3. Healthier Populations through Data and Analytics.
4. Digital Service Excellence.

What were the solutions and impact?

The Trust has delivered a number of varied technology solutions as part of the digital programmes at Alder Hey.

1. Digital Children, Young People & Families - New Models of Care

Over 800 staff have been trained on in how to perform virtual consultations. This means staff can work remotely and patients can attend appointments from home. The Trust sees 4,500 remote appointments consistently every month.

The Trust introduced Alder Play, an app that provides entertainment to children and young people. Designed by the children, young people and families at Alder Hey, Alder Play is an app that provides entertainment and distraction on a rewards-based system. It helps to improve a patient’s overall experience when receiving care and is something they can continue to use at home.

A telemedicine service was introduced to support the Liverpool Neonatal Partnership, which supports neonatal patients at Alder Hey and nearby maternity hospital at Liverpool Women’s Hospital. This enhancesthe safety of a particularly vulnerable patient group and has introduced efficiencies across the service.

Alder Hey has produced its own ‘Symptom Checker’ which is used by families to check a child’s symptoms to then in turn be directed to the most appropriate service, as well as tailored advice and guidance from Alder Hey clinicians.

Digital communications have been deployed Trust-wide, meaning families are now communicated with through digital channels as opposed to paper letters. Feedback from families on this solution has been very encouraging.

2. Outstanding records and safe systems

The Trust introduced “closed loop technology” to reduce human error when administering medications. The technology scans a barcode on a patient’s wristband and then verifies this against the medication being given to ensure the right person is getting the right drug. This safety measure has seen a 50% reduction in error since it was introduced in 2019. It also assists clinicians when taking blood or giving a mum’s breast milk to babies. So far, the technology has been rolled out to all inpatient wards with nurses and other clinicians giving positive feedback, leaving the Trust confident that the system is making medicines administration safer for patients.

Point of care devices have been integrated with the electronic patient record to save time and reduce transcription errors. This technology removes the need for clinicians to note down results or comments and type them up later. Instead, results automatically feed through to the patient record. This frees up time for nursing staff to spend on direct patient care and reduces human error made when typing up results.

Electronic consent has also been deployed across the surgical division to improve patient safety and staff experience, with positive feedback across the board. Alder Hey have also been on a journey to upgrade their electronic patient record through the Alderc@re programme, which is due to go live in Summer 2023.

3. Healthier Populations through Data and Analytics

The reliance on data and analytics for our clinical and operational services at Alder Hey has never been greater. The use of data has increased dramatically over the past two years in line with the pandemic and great strides have been taken in ensuring clinical outcomes and population health management are data driven.

4. Digital Service Excellence

All staff have been migrated over to Office 365 which has garnered greater flexibility, security, access to key information, and enabled staff to work in a more agile manner. A refresh of the core infrastructure was also completed, providing greater resilience for our digital systems. There has also been a portfolio of work completed around keeping our information secure, culminating in the Trust being accredited with a national Cyber Essentials kitemark.

Next steps

As we continue to deliver the Digital and Data Futures Strategy, key upcoming projects include the delivery of a bespoke patient portal for children and families to engage with, implementation of a new analytics portal, a successful electronic patient record upgrade and continued improvement around our technical infrastructure.

As a Trust that role models the digitisation of services, and the development of its staff, the team are also keen to share learnings and support other Trusts and local systems to follow in their footsteps.

Testimonials

‘When we looked back at the last three years, none of us could have predicted the arrival of a world-wide pandemic. While COVID-19 has been devastating for many and is a significant challenge for the NHS in general, it has become an opportunity to develop and expand.

Thanks to the efforts put in place by our team before pandemic, we enabled virtualworking on a scale we never thought possible before which allowed many of our services to continue uninterrupted.

Now that we are facing the recovery phase of the pandemic, we are reflecting on those new ways of working and acknowledging that many of them lead to more efficient processes and better care from patients.

We are facing a very exciting future as a fully digitally enabled Trust.’

Dr Christopher Grime, Chief Clinical Information Officer