Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust (BEH), a provider of integrated mental health services to a population of 1.2 million, has deployed Perfect Ward’s quality improvement digital technology to transform the way it measures quality across a large and complex organisation. Since first introducing the automated health and quality solution to create a Good Governance structure at the Trust’s mental health facilities, over 300 staff in 45 teams rely on the system to conduct 13 quality audits using their smartphones or mobile devices.
Following the success of the programme, BEH has recently extended the roll-out of Perfect Ward to include the organisation’s community health services in Enfield where the majority of the Trust’s 128,000 patients receive care at home or at local clinics. The latest implementation took just four months with 12 of the 20 community teams going live with the Perfect Ward solution in November 2020.
Caroline Sweeney, Deputy Director of Nursing – Quality Governance at Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust commented, “This latest development is part of our overall plan to integrate mental and physical health services to provide a better, more holistic level of care. An ambitious goal like this requires an equally sophisticated tool to bring together our patient safety incident, auditing and patient experience survey results all in one place. Perfect Ward has already proved its worth in supporting Good Governance, combining consistent processes with a cohesive view of all quality activities in a single solution, the basis of a robust QI framework that guarantees continuous improvements in patient care.”
To achieve a swift roll-out to the community teams, the Trust enlisted the support of the IT department to ensure the Perfect Ward solution was installed on people’s mobile devices and that training was delivered remotely ahead of the launch date. By showing how the technology could simplify their life and involving them in the design process, any initial reluctance of staff to engage with the new solution quickly dissipated and inspection rates are now at 100%.
Using Perfect Ward, BEH’s community teams are able to conduct their own audits and even re-configure the content and questions to match their specific requirements. Using their mobile devices, they receive instant feedback, enabling them to act swiftly on the results of audits and track their performance in real-time. The efficiency of the Perfect Ward app vastly reduces the number of hours spent auditing so staff have more time to care for their patients. Staff particularly praise the functionality, allowing them to save their audits and then go back to add or review their work at a time and place to suit them.
Alan Birch, Chief Commercial Officer at Perfect Ward added, “Our highly customisable technology combines intuitiveness with flexible configurability to transform the way organisations like BEH effectively measure quality across their large, complex and diverse organisations. At a glance, both clinical and non-clinical staff in all kinds of healthcare settings are able to flag up issues and monitor performance to boost staff morale and drive meaningful quality improvements simply using their smartphones or mobile devices. What is more, our technology is widely recognised as a valuable strategic tool. With access to dynamic data, NHS Trusts such as BEH are empowered to contribute to National programmes including the Mental Health Act or meet the unique challenges of a global pandemic amid a rapidly changing healthcare landscape.”
