Leading the way in digital innovation
Barts Health NHS Trust is leading the way in virtual video consultations and has caught the attention of the Care Quality Commission (CQC), referring to the service at Newham Hospital as an outstanding area of practice in their recent report.
In October 2017, the Trust was selected by independent charity the Health Foundation, to be part of a £3.5 million national Scaling Up Improvement Programme - to share advice and support teams across the NHS offering online patient appointments.
This builds on the work of the diabetes team at Newham Hospital, which has pioneered online consultations via Skype since 2011. The video consultations have led to better self-management skills in patients and improved attendance rates to outpatient clinics. The work has attracted national attention including the Quality in Care (QiC) and E-Health Insider (EHI) awards in 2013, and more recently as a case study in the 2018 Outpatients: The Future report published by the Royal College of Physicians and the Topol review of digital workforce published by the government in 2019.
The work was evaluated through a National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) grant which showed the huge benefits that video consultations offer patients; less time off work or school, less time spent travelling to and waiting for appointments, and they are cost effective as patients don’t have to pay for public transport or parking.
Barts Health NHS Trust is now leading this work nationally and supporting teams to implement their own virtual video clinics. On-going work includes helping set up online consultations for clinical teams in Oxford and Northumbria.
Looking forward, the team hope to make the clinics work for a range of technology other than Skype and continue expanding the availability to other hospital departments and trusts. The team is also working with government agencies to improve the nationally recommended governance and tariff to support the wider roll out.
The interest from staff across Barts Health is high and has allowed the project team to expand from diabetes clinics into specialties including endocrinology, oncology and rheumatology. They’re also looking forward to introducing video clinics with the neuroscience team at The Royal London Hospital and the children’s speech and language therapy team at Mile End soon.
The project team’s ultimate aim is to create a national network of sites who can learn from each other’s experiences, and to work with partners and commissioners to develop standards of care in this area.
Dr Shanti Vijayaraghavan, diabetes and endocrinology consultant at Newham Hospital has been championing the service in our diabetes clinic. She said: “We have pioneered the use of online consultations locally and it is exciting to see that we are forming a national network of sites working together to learn about using outpatient video consultations and developing standardised national level policy for the practice.”
“I am proud that this initiative started at Newham and that as a Trust we are leading in this area nationally.”
The programme will run until March 2020 when the work will be evaluated by academic leads at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Science at the University of Oxford.
The Scaling Up Improvement programme supports seven projects in the UK to take their proven health care interventions and approaches and make them work at larger scale to have a positive impact on patient outcomes.