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December 2024 - Volume 3. Issue 6.
Welcome,
There are currently two big surveys ongoing, and I can’t emphasise enough the need to take part.
The national Electronic Patent Record (EPR) useability survey which gives users in England the opportunity to share what their thoughts are on their local system.
It’s important to have a strong voice in this as the data should help your team consider what changes are needed locally to make the system easier to use – you can read my thoughts on creating useful, useable and used EPRs on my LinkedIn blog.
The Change NHS consultation invites the public, workforce and organisations to share their ideas for change. This is being used to inform the Governments 10 year health plan for England - this is the opportunity of a generation! The Secretary of State told us he wants radical ideas. I know how creative Nurses and Midwives are, make sure you have your say!
Over 300 people joined us for our second Nursing Documentation masterclass sharing expertise from community, mental health and provider level organisations implementing documentation standards. If you missed this don’t worry as you can now access the recording.
This is the first bulletin since I was permanently appointment as Chief Nursing Information Officer (CNIO) at NHS England, I just wanted to express my deepest thanks for all the support I received carrying out the role in the interim, and for all the kind words since I officially started in October.
One of my first actions has been to boost the talent in the CNIO team, and I want to take the opportunity to welcome Dawn Cross who started working with us in November, you can read more about what Dawn is doing in this month’s bulletin.
Finally, with this being our last bulletin of 2024, we’ve compiled a reflection highlighting work coming from the national team, there are a lot of useful links so make sure to bookmark to read later!
Helen Balsdon, Chief Nursing Information Officer (CNIO) for England
CNIO Spotlight: Breaking Barriers with the Shuri Network
We recently spoke to members of the Shuri Network to hear their experiences being part of the network and taking part in their digital fellowship.
Our CNIO Spotlight shares how the Shuri network has helped members with their professional growth to gain confidence, achieve milestones and advance into new roles.
Read the article to learn more and find out how you can get involved with the Shuri Network.
CNIO Spotlight – Breaking Barriers: How the Shuri Network is Changing the Digital Health Landscape
CNIO team: 2024 Highlights
Nursing Documentation
Following the launch of principles to outline good nursing and midwifery documentation, the Nursing Care Needs Standard was released to support standardisation around the eating and drinking, mobility, elimination, personal hygiene and dressing, skin and medication self-management of a patients record.
Further sharing of knowledge around nursing documentation took place with two online masterclasses. Over 1,500 people registered for the session enabling them first access to listen to the recordings.
“Really inspiring and thought-provoking presentations from a variety of settings. Great to hear of the team’s experiences, lessons learned and how to overcome challenges.”
- Feedback from one of our masterclasses
Special thank you to our presenters Paula Anderson, Sam Neville, Becca Robinson, Emily Burch, Sarah Hanbridge, Jessie Dhaliwal and Vince Barlow for sharing your expertise.
Digital Maternity Record Standards
An update on the Digital Maternity Record Standard took place with the Professional Records Standards Body (PRSB) to reflect changes in clinical practice within maternity and perinatal care in line with the prioritise outlined in NHS England’s three year delivery plan.
This work involved a series of consultations with over 500 clinicians and service users working in or accessing maternity services. The new draft standard looks to be published in 2025.
Maternity Databanks
The Digital Midwife Leadership community have strived forward with an inspiring project focused on digital poverty working with the Good Things Foundation charity.
There has been a national drive to rollout digital hubs within maternity services across the country.
Trusts have partnered with the Good Things Foundation to provide free data to pregnant people under their care who would otherwise be unable to access the internet, enabling them to access essential resources without judgement.
Maternity Digital Hub at Queen Elizabeth NHS Foundation Trust, Kings Lynn
So far over 70 trusts have setup a maternity databank with more planning to implement one.
Midwifes can find out how to get involved in this initiative here
Clinical Results Release Standard
In efforts to empower patients to self-manage their care through apps and online services, there is a very real risk that diagnoses such as cancer could be communicated to patient first before they have a chance to speak with a clinician.
The Clinical guidance for automation of results release in patient engagement portals was developed in the CNIO team to introduce safe timing and continue support to enable self-care.
This work provides developers of patient engagement portals with principles to manage the release of results through electronic means.
Community Nursing
We continued conversation around the needs of community nurses, holding a workshop to understand their technical requirements to perform their role.
The QNI report Nursing in the Digital Age (2023), outlines some of the issues faced such as infrastructure issues, problems with hardware and software, and repetition of data entry. Our discussions focused on how we develop community nursing digital leadership to support and address these needs.
Site visits
We’ve been to see ten different organisations across the country on site visits, many of these were attended by both Helen Balsdon and Jules Gudgeon (CMidIO) to champion that nursing and midwifery is #StrongerTogether to drive change.
Each visit presented unique challenges faced in areas, along with having the opportunity for nurse/midwife led teams to showcase the hard work they are doing in organisations to provide greater care by harnessing the potential of digital and data.
These visits inspired the team so much that it drove the creation of the CNIO FutureNHS Community Case Studies as we felt that with all the good practice happening across the country that this should be shared as wide as possible.
Visiting the command centre at Bradford NHS Foundation Trust
Guidance for Nursing and Midwifery on What Good Looks Like
Since its release in March 2022 digital midwives have run with this guidance to apply its recommendations to their workplace.
Recognising the demand to tailor the guidance to midwifery and refreshing to the 2024 landscape we ran a working group to make improvements. This enabled us to release a new iteration in the summer of the seven success measures, now called the Guidance for Nursing and Midwifery on What Good Looks Like.
Career Frameworks
Our consultation which looked at the training and education needs of the Nursing and Midwifery workforce to use digital and data – The Phillips Ives Review found that the clinical digital specialist workforce wanted a set career pathway, so they understood what skills and competencies they needed to develop to perform the role.
We put together a draft framework of what this looks like and sent to senior nurses and midwives for their feedback. Currently we are analysing the results to apply improvements for a future release.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in reality
“What role does artificial intelligence play for nurses and midwives” is a question we’ve heard a lot since this innovative technology exploded onto the scene.
To get direction on this question we kicked off our discovery project Artificial Intelligence in Reality (AIR) first by doing a review of what is being applied across England, then bringing together an international roundtable of AI experts from academia, industry and practice to discuss it’s potential, challenges and ethical implications.
This has informed our direction, especially how we can utilise what is here and now, and we aim to build on our findings in 2025/26.
New Chief Nursing Officer for England
2024 also saw Duncan Burton become the new Chief Nursing Officer for England. The CNIO team are looking forward to seeing what happens during his tenure, and are ready to help inform CNO direction and priorities to make digital and data mainstream across the profession.
Duncan Burton, new Chief Nursing Officer for England
Training and Education
Watch CNIO Nursing Documentation Masterclass 2
Recording of the October virtual session is now available.
This session contains case studies from:
- Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s Visualise, Optimise, Digitise (VOD) programme, looking the Visualise, Optimise Digitise (VOD) programme which aims to reduce documentation burden and using digital to reduce duplication of records.
- Sussex Community Trust, showing how they are using the guidance to support rehabilitation pathways to effectively document care from hospitals to homes.
- North London Mental Health Trust is using the guidance principles in this care setting.
Watch the recording: Precision in Practice the Art of Nursing Documentation 2 – From Hospital to Home
Nursing Times: Digital Nursing virtual replay
Nursing Times inaugural event Digital Nursing took place in December. The session proved extremely popular with all tickets for the event selling out.
To support the demand for this event Nursing Times are offering a free virtual replay of this event on 10 December.
Sessions explored collobartion between nurses and clinical leaders to drive digital transformation, Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) involvement in digital, documentation standardisation and the potential of AI and data-driven decision making.
To watch register your interest:
Nursing Times Digital Nursing 2024 - Virtual Event | 10 December
Out and about
Meet the newest member of the National team – Dawn Cross
Dawn Cross joins as the Deputy Chief Midwifery Information Officer where she will be leading operational initiatives in digital maternity across the country.
With 24 years' experience as a Midwife, Dawn’s career spans a variety of roles and will be bringing a wealth of knowledge to work close with digital maternity leaders to advance the services.
Helen Balsdon: Making sure that England’s EPRs are “useful, usable and used”
National CNIO at NHS England sat down to write her views on making useable digital systems in healthcare.
In this post Helen discusses the importance of teamwork amongst digital and clinical teams, tailored education that is suitable for nurses and midwives and the importance of measuring useability.
Redefining Healthcare Podcast: Involving Nurses in the design of digital solutions
National CNIO for England took part in this podcast to discuss how EPRs and patient portals are transforming nursing and midwifery.
Helen discussed the importance of digital confidence among nurses, the challenges in equitable access to technology, and explored the potential of AI and predictive analytics in enhancing patient care.
Listen here:
Spotify: Redefining Healthcare: Helen Balsdon - Redefining Healthcare | Podcast on Spotify
Apple: Redefining Healthcare: Helen B–Redefining Healthcare – Apple Podcasts
Find the CNIO team on Bluesky
We’ve loved seeing conversations between healthcare professionals on Bluesky, and look forward to contributing how the use of digital, data, and technology fits into these discussions.
You can now find updates from National CNIO Helen Balsdon and her team here:
What else is going on?
This section outlines various knowledge, news and everything else going on we think the digital nursing and midwifery community will like:
EPR Useability Survey
The EPR Useability Survey is being run by NHS England looking to gain insights into about how well your organisation’s EPR system supports the needs of the workforce.
The survey is designed to provide specific feedback on your organisations EPR system of choice, so this is a good opportunity for nurses and midwives who are seeing where improvement is needed, but don’t know where to present these ideas.
The survey closes on 20 December and takes about 8 minutes to complete. Findings will help inform NHS England priorities to support EPR implementation and all organisations will received specific feedback on the findings about their system.
Qualtrics: Welcome to the NHS England national EPR usability survey
Change.uk NHS 10 Year Plan Survey
The 10 Year Health Plan for England is open to everyone's views on what they want the future of the NHS to look like - the CNIO team want to make sure digital is at the heart of this!
We invite readers to make your views heard and share how you think nurses and midwives can contribute to the plan to deliver positive change for patients and improve working lives.
Submit your ideas and feedback at: change.nhs.uk
The Frontline Digitisation Support Offer: Your EPR One-Stop Shop
Implementing EPR systems can be complex, so the Frontline Digitisation Support Offer (FDSO) programme offer free, at point-of-use support to all applicable Trusts.
Access to expert-led events on trending topics, networks for peer collaboration, and the EPR Support Hub - a goldmine of blueprints, documentation, and templates ready for immediate use.
Join the EPR Support Hub on FutureNHS.
Keep updated with the latest EPR insights, subscribe to the FDSO Bulletin.
CNIO FutureNHS Community Case Studies: Drop in sessions
We’re building up our case studies library for 2025.
If you have good work to share, a project that others could adapt, or something else, then you might want to consider submitting a case study.
You can contact us at england.cnio@nhs.net to pitch your idea and start the process, or if you want further advice on requirements and how to complete your case study you can join one of our drop-in sessions.
No registration is required, just click the link that fits your availability and download the calendar invite.
9 January 2025 11am-12pm: Further details
15 January 2025 10-11am: Further details
20 January 2025 12-1pm: Further details
Keep in touch
If you have any thoughts, feedback, or have anything you feel we need to be talking about, please do get in touch.
Best wishes,
CNIO Team, NHS England
Reading the link version of the bulletin? Don’t want to miss out? Join our Digital Nursing FutureNHS community to receive a copy in your email every month.
