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In this series of case studies, CQC highlight what providers have done to take a flexible approach to staffing. The case studies show different ways of organising services. They focus on the quality of care, patient safety, and efficiency, rather than just numbers and ratios of staff. They illustrate how providers have redesigned services to make the best use of the available range of skills and discipline or they found new ways to work with others in the local health and care system. Safe, effective staffing is about having enough people with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time. It's about team work, not silo working. It's about developing staff to support each other in new roles - making sure patients follow the smoothest possible journey on their care pathway.

Summit objectives: to foster connections and support networking across the Alliance to surface key issues that are top of mind to Alliance leaders to support capacity around personal, organisational, and industry leadership to promote discussion and activities that foster and advance courageous, creative, collaborative leadership across the network to inform and advance the direction of engagement, collaboration, and collective action opportunities across the Alliance network.

Paper observation charts are now a thing of the past where I work. Gone are the days of charting your patients’ blood pressure and pulse in the tiniest of boxes. So small you could barely see the date and time of day at the top. Often, the chart looked as if it had been filled in by a spider with inky feet, sometimes it was sticky from medication that had been spilt on it (or sometimes worse). It would be passed from one clinician to another, a little ragged round the edges. Nurses had to remember when to do the next set of observations according to the National Early Warning Score (NEWS). As for auditing observations to ensure we were adhering to national guidance for the whole hospital… forget it. We had been use to this for years. But now we have a new chart in town… e-obs. This is going to solve all our problems. At the click of a button you have a clean, legible, fully completed observation chart. Each patient would have followed the NEWS escalation as the ‘electronic system’ would remind the nurse to complete the next set of observations at the correct time. Auditing would be a few clicks away. How many patients are scoring 5 or more? Who and where are the sickest patients? Which wards are not adhering to national policy? It is all there. This is a terminal case of ‘work as imagined’. Firstly, lets clear this up. Just because a patient is scoring a NEWS score of over 5 does not mean they are the sickest of patients. Many patients who are deteriorating, especially the younger population, score lower than 5. Patients in acute kidney injury often do not score at all but may require a trip to the intensive care unit. Do not be fooled by the NEWS score. NEWS is but a number. We must look holistically at our patients and not rely on looking at just numbers. I would like to share something that happened the other day that highlights some of the pitfalls of using an electronic observation system. I am a junior doctor on an elderly care ward. One of my patients became acutely unwell at 10pm on a Sunday evening. He couldn’t breathe, his NEWS was 9, he looked and sounded awful. I thought he was going to die. The medial emergency team came. They gave him suction, the chest physiotherapist came, they changed his antibiotics. He got a little better. His NEWS went down to 4. How did this happen? Surely, he didn’t suddenly get this unwell. He was doing well the day before. I looked at his observations. They were documented beautifully on the screen. Very clear. However, he hadn’t had his obs taken for 12 hours despite his last NEWS score was 3 (this means obs need to be taken again 4–6 hours later). Why didn’t the electronic system alert the nurses to take the obs? This is a forceable function of the system? This is why we changed to an electronic system in the first place… to prevent this type of harm from happening. So, what happened? The patient had been scoring 0 for the last few days. This means that obs can be taken every 12 hours. The patient then scored 3. His oxygen saturations had dropped. As he was ‘stable’ the nurse then changed the profile of when the next set of observations were taken. Instead of the default setting of 4–6 hourly, they had set it for 12 hourly again. This is against national guidance. Profile changes are taught to the nurses and doctors when being inducted to the e-obs system. This is important to know especially if the patient is dying, off the ward or having a blood transfusion, post op etc... This means that the patient will get their observations taken at the right time depending on what is going on. Instead, the nurse had changed the profile so that the patient received less monitoring. What was the reason for this? Was it because he had been so stable before, that they thought he didn’t require more frequent observations? Was it due to ward pressures – they didn’t have time to do that frequency of obs? What ever the reason. Its against national guidance and this ‘safe system’ has allowed us to do so. There is also another problem at play here. Take another example. A patient is receiving 12 hourly observations. They are stable. What happens when the patient may ‘look unwell’ or they complain of pain or breathlessness? You take another set of observations. The trouble is. They are not due. The system won’t let you ‘log them’. Not only is this frustrating, it also takes away intuition and assessing your patient from the bedside. We cannot be complacent. Looking at numbers on a screen is not an indicator on how well your patient is. Paperless, automated systems are brilliant. They will revolutionise healthcare, it will make care safer. We have to be mindful that these are early stages. There will be problems along the way. I just wish that there was some user testing before they rolled e-obs out. Healthcare staff will take short cuts, will do unexpected things, won't always realise these consequences. Yes, it would have cost money, it would have taken time but, if they had user tested this with real staff, perhaps this man may not have suffered?

The study analysed whether the system generated clinically valid alerts and its estimated cost savings associated with potentially prevented adverse events. These alerts were compared to alerts in the CDS system, using a random sample of 300 alerts selected for medical record review. Findings showed a total of 10,668 alerts during the five-year period. Overall, 68.2% of the alerts would not have been generated by the existing CDS system. Ninety-two percent of a random sample of the chart-reviewed alerts were accurate based on structured data available in the record, and 80% were clinically valid. The estimated cost of adverse events potentially prevented in an outpatient setting was more than $60 per drug alert and $1.3 million when extrapolating the study’s findings to the full patient population.

This initiative was set up by theatre nurse, Carol Menashy, Chase Farm Hospital, the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust. It is a fun game to get staff in the operating theatre to really think about cost and wastage within theatres. While playing the game – Twist and Shout, by the Beatles is played. Attached are some fun exercises with shopping lists for various procedures where teams vie to get the closest estimate to the actual cost. Worked out by senior staff. Nearest team wins a box of toffees. Also, we do a cost awareness exercise audit fun day. Monthly audit of the cost buster bin where out of date items or items opened in error is audited monthly to see how much we are wasting and aiming to improve. The bin is placed inside the stock room. Here are some template questions you could use or make up your own depending on what surgeries you undertake. I'd love to hear from anyone who tries it out or from anyone who has similar initiatives.

This report covers research that has been conducted by NHSX and a great number of partners across the digital health ecosystem into: What AI is and where it's being used. How to govern AI. How to protect patient safety. How to support the workforce. How to encourage adoption and spread. The results of this research ultimately lead us to the conclusion that the creation of the Lab will be essential if we are to capitalise on the opportunities identified, whilst mitigating the risks.

I am a GP in Northampton and for some time, around 2006, I was concerned that my practice did not have a robust system for monitoring patients on dangerous drugs such as methotrexate and azathioprine. We tried to keep a manual database for our patient register, but with patients stopping and starting these drugs, moving in and out of the practice, and needing different tests at different time intervals, it was a really difficult task, and I suspected that we were missing patients and, therefore, it was hard to keep track of who needed reminding regarding tests. I tried working with my Practice Manager to create a more sophisticated spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, then when that failed, within Microsoft Access. Again, we kept on coming across problems and I knew we hadn’t cracked the problem yet. Then I started talking to Tim – Tim is an IT software developer and, while we were watching our children’s swimming lesson, I was explaining to him the complexities of what I was trying to achieve, and he immediately took up the challenge and promised to write me a bespoke programme. Two years later and many Sunday afternoons spent drinking oodles of cups of tea, Neptune was created. We have been successfully running Neptune in my GP surgery since 2008, following which we introduced it to four beta testing sites. The system worked remarkably well from the start and very quickly we expanded to other local practices. Over the past 2 years we have been fortunate enough to roll out across the whole of Leeds Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs)(approximately 100 GP practices). Neptune’s success lies in its simplicity. It is a relational database that stores information about as many drugs as you would like, such as generic and brand name, BNF category and what monitoring tests are required. It uses three simple reports from the GP practice system to upload patient, drug and testing information and then puts this all together into a reminder list and either prints reminder letters, sends an email through a secure nhs.net account or produces an SMS text alert via MJOG. If the patient does not respond to their reminder, then a second reminder and then a third reminder is sent, with the final reminder being an alert to the prescribing GP. Like all new developments, we have faced a few challenges along the way. Not least was how to roll out to 100 practices in Leeds which is a long way from Northampton. We brought other members on to our team, and now have two trainers and two other software support as well as me and Tim. We love going into GP practices and seeing how everyone has tackled this problem differently, or not at all in some places. We have found, in general, the better the system already in place, the more Neptune is appreciated as the practice already appreciates what a difficult task this is. Neptune continually evolves and we love to change according to user feedback. We are now on to version 4, with version 5 just around the corner. Our current project is to include not just CCG defined amber drugs for the Near Patient Testing Direct Enhanced Service, but all drugs that require monitoring such as diuretics, ACE inhibitors and thyroid drugs. This will increase the patient population that Neptune monitors considerably, but the impact on patient safety will be immeasurable and, hopefully, will improve safety, reduce hospital admissions and, ultimately, iatrogenic harm and even death. We would love to roll out Neptune to as many practices as possible as we believe this is the best, most accurate and efficient way of performing this challenging task.

This special issue focuses on the role of technology and innovation in patient experience and includes editorials, commentaries, personal narratives, research articles and a case study.

HUH Action Cards were initially developed made from plastic and guided nursing teams on recognition and treatment. This improved tenfold, with 100% of patients being identified and treated for sepsis according to the CQUINN. However, the challenges of these cards included infection control of cards, becoming worn and heaviness of lanyards. An App was then planned in collaboration with BD. This App would be much more user friendly, dynamic and would have increased functionality. Challenges included getting stakeholders on board with this, considering that this concept started at 'grass-root' level nursing and also whether this would be suitable with our IT systems and firewalls. Further ideas were put together about making this not just nursing orientated, but for medical staff and allied professionals, incorporating IV guides, micro-guides and toxbase to name a few along, with standard operating procedures and resuscitation guidelines. This would be a 'one stop shop' for all things, and would "save 2 minutes” to spend with our patients as oppose to searching for a computer or dealing with slow departmental systems.