We have started this work by focusing on adult inpatient risk assessments.
Nursing and ICT colleagues have worked together to revise our risk assessment documents, take anything out that was deemed no longer necessary or reduced duplication, and added a couple of new documents to allow us to record and measure some elements of care we felt were important such as mouth care.
We know staff are busy delivery care and updating assessments can be forgotten, so our new system allows us to make it easier for staff to update records in a timely way as we can send alerts to staff to remind them which assessments need reassessing.
This saves staff having to read through whole documents unnecessarily to find the assessments they have to update.
We are currently on track to launch our new electronic adult risk assessments in April.
We already know that we will see some benefits to this work including cost reduction of printed documents and related scanning cost (circa £407k by year 3), and release senior nursing time from related audits (2hrs x 142 areas each month of Band 7 or above level nursing staff once all adult and paediatric documents are converted to electronic versions)