Contents

  • Richard Cotterell, Chairman
  • Neil Carr, Chief Executive Officer
  • Chris Ibell, Chief Digital Information Officer

Richard Cotterell, Chairman

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Innovation, how we apply technology and how we maximize the use of data are fundamental building blocks in our transformation journey as we manage the challenges and opportunities ahead of us.

I am therefore really pleased to see we have engaged and sought feedback from our service users and Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (MPFT) team as we have developed our digital strategy.

As a Board we are fully committed to our digital transformation journey, and we will ensure the engagement process continues through the delivery phases to make sure the strategy becomes a reality in the coming years.

I am pleased to see a vision that is both achievable and one that will resonate across the organisation. For me, the most important element of the strategy is ensuring that the people we care for have their personal information following them as they travel around their care pathways.

I would like to ensure our service users do not need to explain everything repeatedly to multiple services across our Trust and partners and that they also have an understanding of where they are in their journey as they travel down our care pathways.

Therefore, as we develop our new integrated pathways, we need to put digital at the centre of what we do ensuring our service users experience is seamless, simpler and easier to use.

I firmly believe that our digital strategy can make a real and tangible difference to the people we care for and to our MPFT team and through co production and teamwork we can make our vision come alive.
 

Neil Carr, Chief Executive Officer

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Since its birth in 1948, never before has the NHS been under more demand and more pressure.

Over my NHS career, and in particular in my time as a Chief Executive Officer, I have witnessed much transformation and change, but never with such clinical and care demand and financial efficiencies to be achieved at the same time.

I have overseen expansions and consolidations, introductions of many new models of care and new partnerships.

If there was ever a time where streamlined models of care through partnership working and maximising the use of technology was fundamental, it is now.

Our digital strategy sets out in detail how we aim to deliver on our organisational, regional and national commitments, and throughout this strategy, it is clear that there is nothing more important than improving service user safety and achieving better outcomes for their health and care. We put our service users central to our digital needs.

We know our populations are growing and we know that with longer life expectancy comes potentially more long-term health conditions, yet we cannot and will not focus on health alone. Personal circumstances also have to be carefully considered, managed and supported.

How we provide health and social care today across the regions where MPFT deliver our services and how we begin to make huge strides with our partners within our integrated care systems (ICS) will be aligned to how successful we are in the delivery of our digital strategy.

I think through digital we have a perfect opportunity over the next 12-months to be match-fit digitally in readiness for our ICS strategy. With the demands as they are, unless we do things in partnership, we are dead in the water.

Fellow providers, primary care, acute services, ambulatory care, private sector, social care and 3rd sector services all rely upon digital systems in their daily operations, and if MPFT are to collaborate on wrapping these services around the individual within our localities, we need to find ways of connecting these systems together.

How we capture data, access information and analyse data is far too complicated. Through this digital strategy we will use our information far more effectively.

Data is most useful at the point of delivery to help influence day to day decisions and we need to empower our service users and staff with the information they need to make the best choices. It is essential that we also lift this information to a macro scale to inform population health needs and where our system priorities and focus areas should be.

We will embrace that one size doesn’t fit all. Health inequalities and avoiding exclusion through our digital transformation journey will be key.

We will strive to achieve true service user empowerment, remote care offers, health promotion approaches and better care plan access will empower as many of our service users to be in charge of their own health and care circumstances as possible.

The focus has to change from illness to wellness, and through our digital approaches we can wholly support that.

This strategy embraces that through digital, we are only limited by our own imagination.
 

Chris Ibell, Chief Digital Information Officer

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A critical success factor in managing change is to ensure that you bring people along with you, ensuring commonality of purpose as well as clarity and agreement on the steps to achieve the vision.

Digital innovation can be challenging to many, both for some of our staff members as well as for service users. In particular, given the nature of our specific business, namely delivering Health and Care services to some of the most vulnerable in our society, we need to ensure that our digital offerings provide choice and accommodate the needs of all.

It is critical that digital and clinical innovation go hand in hand, and to this end, I commend this strategy to the Board, especially given its clear focus on and extensive engagement with our staff and service users.

This digital strategy and transformation plan is certainly ambitious and lays the groundwork for the introduction of new technologies that will enable the transformation of Health and Care for many years to come.

It will support our staff to meet and exceed their goals as they relate to care excellence, leverage the broader Health and Care network including primary and social care, as well as facilitate direct service users’ participation in their own healthcare management.