Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
One centralised Electronic Patient Record (EPR), accessible across multiple care settings, is helping to provide better, safer, patient-centred care at Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.
Rio, our industry-leading EPR for mental and community health, allows NHS staff to access and update patient care records wherever they are
Somerset Partnership offers a full range of integrated community health, mental health, learning disabilities and social care services to people of all ages. In 2002, Somerset Partnership was the first NHS trust in England to implement a fully functioning EPR specifically for mental health.
Introduction
In 2012, Somerset Partnership began to expand the use of Rio to its community services, including district nursing, and podiatry, as well as its community hospitals, so that today, there is one centralised record for each patient. Rio manages both administrative and clinical processes and can be tailored to an organisation’s specific needs across mental health, child health and community care settings.
Over time, we have developed the feature-rich EPR in close collaboration with the Trust. This relationship has been instrumental in the development of Rio’s eObservations solution, which removes the need for nurses to record observations on paper charts or manually calculate early warning scores.
Expanding services across Somerset
Somerset is a diverse and rural county, so staff are often travelling across its 13 community hospitals, and in between its nine mental health wards and seven minor injury units (MIU), as well as visiting patients in their own homes. It uses Rio’s mobile platform to help support paperless and mobile working, aiding its healthcare professionals to provide seamless, patient-centred care.
The Trust also use Rio’s Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (ePMA) module, designed to help improve the efficiency and safety of prescriptions by ensuring the correct information is always available.
The Oceano Patient Administration System records patient engagement at the Trust’s MIUs. It manages patient demographics, referrals, appointments and waiting list data.
With approximately 2,700 netbooks and laptops in use by the Trust’s staff, records can be created, accessed and updated at the point of care on any device, which reduces clinical risk through misinterpretation of hand-written records
We’ve worked with them throughout its clinical systems history, and through our collaborative relationship, we’ve helped to create a robust EPR that spans both community and mental health services. Somerset Partnership is a great example that state-of-the-art working is not just in acute settings, it’s here in community hospitals.
The result
- An integrated record that can be accessed by all staff – providing full visibility of a patient’s care plan, risk history, alerts and progress notes, helping the Trust to deliver consistent, effective care
- All 13 community hospitals and nine mental health units are virtually paper-free, reducing costs, improving efficiencies and helping to meet government policy and the NHS agenda
- Avoidance of duplication and errors caused by multiple records, resulting in one clear picture of a patient’s health
Inspiring others
The next step for Somerset Partnership is to introduce Conexes, their cloud-based interoperability platform that enables a safe space to share data between various systems and mobile apps, to deliver an even more integrated approach to care. The Trust will also be working collaboratively with us to deploy Flow, a system that provides a real-time view of bed occupancy, across all of its community hospital wards, helping further to improve the quality of patient care across the county.
