The sixth round of the Innovating for Improvement programme is supporting 21 health care projects across the UK with the aim of improving health care delivery and/or the way people manage their own health care through the redesign of processes, practices and services.
The innovative project from NAViGO aims to innovatively present data to improve service user safety, reduce serious incidents and inform Clinical Caseload Management.
To aid suicide reduction and decrease premature mortality in NE Lincolnshire, clinical staff within secondary mental health services will receive data dashboards containing safety indicators to identify patients at risk or requiring follow-up. Dashboards will comprise existing disparate data held in the mental health electronic patient record (EPR) including risk assessments, demographic, contact, and referral information.
Dashboards will link the EPR to the data warehouse to present information visually. A weekly email containing the dashboard will be auto-generated from the data warehouse to clinicians and their line managers to encourage engagement. This will aid in the management of large caseloads, displaying previously identified suicide/premature mortality risk factors alongside those collected but not considered for evaluating risk underpinned by national/local data.
For example: Local Serious Incident Action Plan
• Patient not contacted within the past 28 days
• Patient did not attend latest planned contact and yet to be seen
• Patient recently presented to Crisis Team National Confidential Inquiry Suicide and Homicide
• Patient lives alone
• Patient undergone suicide risk assessment Reducing premature mortality
• Patient requires a physical health assessment
• Patient requires GP appointment
This differs from current approaches as it uses existing local and national data/research to display disparate data together visually and transform it into meaningful information to improve patient outcomes. The team will be led by Lisa Denton, Head of Performance and Business Support, in conjunction with Amanda Simpson, Associate Director of Nursing and Quality.
Lisa Denton, Head of Performance and Business Support at NAViGO said, ‘As an Infrastructure service we are really impassioned to make a positive impact on service user care. This development is a simple way in which we can achieve this by providing front line practitioners with information they already collect for national datasets and creating a visual tool to encourage them to use it to maximise service user safety. Based on existing data warehouse functionality this initiative will be cost effective and may be implemented quickly.’
Sarah Henderson, Associate Director from the Health Foundation, said, ‘We are very excited to be working with such high-calibre teams, who all have great innovative ideas. We are keen to support innovation at the frontline across all sectors of health and care services, and I am pleased that we will be able to support these ambitious teams to develop and test their ideas over the next year. ‘Our aim is to promote the effectiveness and impact of the teams’ innovations and show how they have succeeded in improving the quality of health care, with the intention of these being widely adopted across the UK.’
The programme will run for fifteen months and each project will receive up to £75,000 of funding to support the implementation and evaluation of the project.