The NECS UEC-RAIDR System Control Centre team has been nominated for The Excellence in Urgent and Emergency Care category at the prestigious NHS Parliamentary Awards.
The NHS Parliamentary Awards took place on July 5th 2023, which was also the NHS’s 75th birthday, and were designed to celebrate the work of all NHS colleagues and those who work alongside them to improve and join up care in their communities. Entries are supported by a MP and the UEC-RAIDR SCC team at NECS, which is part of the NHS, was nominated by Mary Kelly Foy MP, Labour MP for the City of Durham.
The UEC-RAIDR System Control Centre app was created collaboratively between the NECS team and NHS staff to show system capacity and pressures. It supports staff to provide high quality patient care at times of intense pressure and has improved how people who need urgent and emergency care are treated.
UEC-RAIDR SCC gathers information from services, including 111, ambulance and hospital services, GPs, mental health, community services and care homes, across health and social care to provide a near-real time picture of the pressures and capacity. Colour-coded pressure and capacity indicators highlight at a glance where hotspots and available capacity are, allowing staff to rapidly implement internal action plans or reach out across the region for coordinated support for those services when needed.
Stephen Childs, Managing Director of NECS, said: “We are very proud to have created the UEC-RAIDR tool in partnership with the NHS providers and commissioners of the North East and North Cumbria. We can see the difference it is making to the management of urgent and emergency care from general practice through ambulance services to hospital emergency departments.
“Ultimately this means better care for patients and that is what we set out to do every day, in pursuit of our vision: to make life changing improvements to the communities we serve.”
The NECS team developed the app in collaboration with local A&E doctors and nurses, ambulance service staff, Primary Care staff, local authority and wider operational staff. It is an essential daily tool across health and social care, supporting all regional services staff to improve care for patients who need urgent treatment, including:
- reducing the need for clinicians and operational managers to spend time responding to requests for information about the position, allowing them to focus instead on patients and frontline delivery
- improving system wide collaboration and ways of working through the regional sharing of data and subsequent mutual aid and support offers where areas are under more pressure
- saving time on internal hospital processes through the alerting of actions implemented and triggers reached to UEC-RAIDR SCC users across staff groups, regardless of location or position.
Marc Hopkinson, Director of System Resilience at NHS North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB), said: “UEC-RAIDR SCC makes a huge difference to the way we manage operational pressures in our urgent and emergency care system. The app helps us to provide strong system co-ordination, oversight and leadership around system pressures or incidents, with easy access to system-wide real time data as well as a chat function making fast communication easier across the system.
“NECS has been close partners with our ICB, creating a practical solution that helps us make the best possible use of resources when the system is under pressure. With UEC-RAIDR SCC we can review pressures at an early stage, proactively liaising with hospitals and taking steps such as mutual aid or ambulance diverts to ensure patient flow and safety. Our Trust colleagues also use it to alert and update key staff such as on-call teams.”
Mary Kelly Foy MP, Labour MP for the City of Durham, said: “I was pleased to support the NECS team in the NHS Parliamentary Awards. Their innovation has been crucial in relieving pressures in the NHS, while also improving patient care. It is brilliant to see a North East team leading the way in the creation of much needed technology.”