The Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust (NCA) was facing significant challenges with their current system landscape for intrapartum, post-natal, and neo-natal care. NCA provides a wide range of hospital, community health and care services to over one million people across the boroughs of Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, and Salford as well as specialist care to patients from Greater Manchester and beyond.

NCA’s Maternity Department aims to provide the highest standard of care and support, whether individuals have their baby in hospital or at home. The team provides one-to-one midwifery-led care tailored to individual needs as well as delivering more specialist advice and support for more complex pregnancies.

The organisation relied on three vendor solutions (BadgerNet, K2, and Euroking), resulting in poor interoperability, duplicated entries, and continued dependence on paper-based processes. Additionally, each system captured and displayed data differently, making it difficult to pull data for reporting purposes. The resource perspective was also problematic, as staff had to learn and manage three different systems, leading to increased training requirements and reduced clinical availability.

To overcome these issues, the NCA decided to consolidate their systems into a single solution capable of fulfilling the functions of all three systems combined. This move had several positive impacts, including aligning with the National Strategy by reducing the number of systems in use, promoting transfer applications, reducing transcription errors, and enhancing the interoperability of systems for improved clinical care.

Solution:

The NCA opted for BadgerNet, a specialist provider of maternity and neonatal systems, to provide a comprehensive system capable of supporting various care areas, such as EPAU, Antenatal Clinic, Maternity Triage, PFU, Antenatal Ward, Birthing Centre, Labour Ward, Postnatal, NICU, and Community. BadgerNet met the NCA’s requirements by allowing remote interaction with the maternity record, real-time updates, integration with home monitoring devices, reminders and public health messages, offline access with automatic synchronisation, alignment with digital maternity record standards, and commitment to interoperability and standards used within the NCA.

To implement this solution, the NCA formed a project team consisting of a Programme Manager, Head of Business Change, Integration Lead, 12 Business Change Analysts, 2 Digital Midwives, and a Lead Obstetrician serving as the overall clinical lead. Approximately six hundred midwives, nurses, and doctors received training on the new system.

Apira offered “exceptional service, extremely diligent with the ability to be people focused……strong relationships with both the digital change team and clinical colleagues. It’s been an extremely challenging project given current capacity problems ….this has required an empathetic, versatile style of project management to ensure the new system has been delivered safely and securely whilst minimising service disruption and enabling adoption”.

Tracey Watson

Director for Digital Transformation at NCA

Benefits Realised:

The implementation of the consolidated maternity and neonatal system yielded numerous benefits for the NCA:

Maternity and neonatal system sunsetting: Avoidance of legacy system costs.
Reduction in paper usage, consumables, and manual data entry from paper forms.
Elimination of duplicated data entry across systems.
Comprehensive access to the full maternity record for staff working in the community.
Enhanced data quality and streamlined auditing of maternity services information.
Record access for women and birthing people, enabling them to view their own records, access support information, and engage electronically with the trust.
Mitigation of information governance risks and improved control and processes.
Meeting the strategic requirements of the Maternity Incentive Scheme Year 4 (Safety Action 2).
Improved reputation and increased patient attraction due to the introduction of a safer system.