Digital focus at MFT
I joined Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) as group chief executive in April of last year. It’s great to be back in Manchester, having started my nursing career right here 32 years ago, working in three of our hospitals.
Right now, our big focus is on the implementation of our new five-year strategy, ‘Where Excellence Meets Compassion’. A key part of this is embedding digitally enabled care across MFT. Technology and digital solutions are central to our plans, especially as we build on the successful early implementation phase of our electronic patient record system, Hive, in 2022.
One of my priorities when joining the trust was to ensure we had the right focus at board level for this agenda, not just for today, but for the future. We have some great technical and clinical talent leading our digital transformation, but we needed a dedicated member of the executive team to drive this portfolio forward, working alongside our clinicians.
We have recently welcomed David Walliker to the team as our new chief digital and information officer – he is leading our efforts to enhance our digital infrastructure, strengthen cyber security, and develop an innovative data strategy for the trust. All of this will put us in the best position to drive further improvements and evaluate emerging digital solutions which may offer benefits.
Implementing the EPR
When MFT was formed in 2017, the team describe how quickly they knew that the existing systems we inherited were not up to the task for a trust of our size and scale. We wanted to ensure that all patients had equal access to high quality care, regardless of where they were located. To do this effectively, we needed a fully integrated EPR system.
With 10 hospital sites and extensive community health services, introducing an EPR was a significant undertaking. After a lot of effort and collaboration among colleagues right across MFT, our EPR Hive went live in September 2022. We chose Hive because we believe meets our needs for patients, clinical and operational use, and of course, for research. Now, we have a single trust-wide hospital record for each patient, accessible across all our sites and services.
Although we are a big organisation, we are not an island. It’s important that we continue to work with all system partners ensuring there is appropriate connectivity between our systems, supported by appropriate data sharing agreements.
When I came on board in April 2023, Hive had been live for just over six months. What immediately impressed me was the clinical leadership of the programme and the level of governance and assurance built into the implementation. Hive had executive board-level leadership and oversight from the beginning to support with escalations and risk management, demonstrating the importance of this project to the trust.
Our approach at MFT is that Hive is clinically-led, operationally-delivered and digitally-enabled; it’s a comprehensive programme that touches every part of MFT. The fact that it is led by clinicians and a multidisciplinary team means we always keep patient care at the forefront. Transformations of this scale naturally come with challenges and take time, but we are continually working to make our digital processes and new ways of working as smooth as possible.
Improvements and benefits
