100% Coverage for SystmOne Child Health in Two Regions

By the end of the 2008/09 financial year, both Yorkshire and the Humber and East of England SHAs are predicting that all of their PCTs will be deploying or already using SystmOne Child Health. In 2008, Yorkshire and the Humber SHA saw six additional PCTs go live on SystmOne Child Health.

Tony Megaw, Primary Care Programme Manager for NHS Yorkshire and the Humber, says, "SystmOne is the SHA's strategic solution for Child Health. Across the region, we are joining­ up IT, and Child Health is a key part of that. All of the children we care for will now benefit from an integrated record that can follow them as they move through primary care. We are also working hard to increase the coverage of other SystmOne modules, such as GP and Community, so that we can help provide the people of the Yorkshire and the Humber region with truly integrated health care."

For more on Yorkshire and the Humber's SystmOne roll-out, see the 'Detailed Care Record' stories on our SystmOne In The News page.

Simon McCreath is IT Project Manager for North Yorkshire and York NHS, where SystmOne has recently gone live at Scarborough, Whitby and Ryedale CHS. "We're a large PCT with Child Health Services in four locations. Our plan is to deploy SystmOne to all services. We've now got three localities live and we are confident about getting SystmOne implemented across the whole PCT. In the Scarborough locality, we can also extend the use of the Child Health system to outlying offices; something our legacy system didn't have the technical capacity to do."

"We were concerned that the data migration would present us with problems because TPP and CSC hadn't done a migration for our legacy system before," says Simon. "But TPP has a lot of expertise in Child Health and they understood the data well, so the migration ran quite smoothly. Any problems were resolved and the project ran to time. The fact that staff had direct access to TPP on the phone and using the Contact Tracker, and that all contact was recorded and audited proved very effective. We were very pleased with the migration."

Staff at Scarborough, Whitby and Ryedale CHS are enjoying using SystmOne, as Simon explains: "The staff are very enthusiastic, they find SystmOne easy to use and effective. In the past when new vaccination or government programmes were announced, developments to the system had to be done in-­house, which was a headache. Now, TPP look after all of that so staff needn't worry about it. That's a real benefit."

Simon continues, "We are very pleased with the ease in which children can now be located and transferred from either of our two other localities, or indeed from other PCTs using SystmOne Child Health. There's a great benefit there in managing arrivals or movements in and out."

The benefits of sharing records extends beyond Child Health Services: "We have major programmes rolling out SystmOne in GP and Community in North Yorkshire. We're starting to realise real benefits to the patient in sharing information across the three products, and looking forward to realising that to a much greater degree as we implement more units.”

Elsewhere, in Calderdale PCT and the Huddersfield area of Kirklees PCT, SystmOne was chosen to replace a system that was soon to become unsupported. Steve Roscoe, Project Manager, says, "The contracts were ending with the legacy system, so we knew we had to move to something new, fairly quickly."

Staff in both Calderdale and Huddersfield Child Health departments embraced the move to SystmOne. Steve says, "Some staff had been using an old DOS-­based system for a long time. It was difficult for them to move over to a Windows­-based system, but they've all had the right attitude, there was never any resistance to change and now everyone's getting to grips with the functionality that they have in SystmOne. The deployment team has risen to every challenge and met it; managing and working on two separate Child Health projects with Go Live dates only two weeks apart has been a challenge but we've enjoyed it."

The deployment has a very specific benefit for staff in Calderdale and Huddersfield as all women's and children's services, including the birthing centre, are consolidated at Calderdale Royal Hospital. "That means all mums come to Calderdale Royal," says Steve. "Calderdale Child Health department in the past had to register most of Huddersfield's children, then de­register them, and send the paperwork to Huddersfield where they'd be registered again. One of the big benefits SystmOne has given us, and this is something we've used since day three, is the ability to share care across to Huddersfield. They now immediately have the child's data without us having to shuffle any paper from Calderdale."

In North East Lincolnshire, the development of a new Children's Trust in partnership with the local council was a driver for SystmOne, as Doug Scott, Programme Manager, explains: "Before the Children's Trust was formed, we wanted to make sure all children's services (including Health Visiting, School Nursing and Safeguarding Children) were using SystmOne so that the Trust went forward with a single cohesive record. The other services were already using SystmOne, so Child Health was the missing part of the jigsaw."

Staff in North East Lincolnshire weren't just dealing with changing systems, they were also undergoing organisational change and moving premises. "Despite all of the problems the staff were having, they were engaged and recognised that moving to SystmOne was the way forward," says Doug. "To be honest, in terms of problems etcetera, the deployment was a bit uneventful! It was well supported and we are pleased with the outcome."

The implementation of SystmOne across all Child Health Services in Yorkshire and the Humber isn't the end of the story, as Doug explains: "We're trying to use the fact that information is going in in one area to make something happen in another, to improve processes. For example, the Child Health department gets to know about a birth through NN4B and they could use that to send a message to primary care so that they can enact their processes, such as post­discharge visits, earlier."

Doug concludes: "We've got to see the Child Health record as part of a strategic community­wide shared record. It's part of a big picture. We've always taken the view that what systems GPs use is their choice, but as more services take on SystmOne, the advantages for the GP become greater. Yorkshire and the Humber SHA is demonstrating that the National Programme is achievable. That's really good news."

For more on Yorkshire and the Humber's SystmOne roll-out, see the 'Detailed Care Record' stories on our SystmOne In The News page.