In October we worked alongside our partners at the West Midlands AHSN to deliver Midlands Digital Health and Care Week, a week of standalone virtual sessions featuring case studies from health and care partners showcasing digital best practice and talks from senior leaders on key digital health themes. Here Mike Watson, our Digital Lead, reflects on the week, the digital health themes that emerged and what’s next.

As part of our role to foster and sustain knowledge exchange across the internal and external networks that connect health and care in the Midlands, the East Midlands and West Midlands Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) came together to jointly deliver a weeklong series of virtual events across from 12-16 of October on digital health in the Midlands.

We had some excellent speakers covering themes in digital health including NHSX and regional teams who provided updates on digital care home transformation and Andy Callow from Northampton General Hospital kicked the week off with a keynote on making things open to make things better. As well as these talks, we showcased a series of digital innovations and initiatives from across the Midlands that have helped the region respond to the demands and pressures generated by the current pandemic.

These showcases were designed to be short overviews of the problem being addressed, the innovation and reflections on their implementation. The webinars were recorded and you can watch them here.

As our first online sharing event of this kind, we were thrilled with the response we received and the appetite to share best practice, both from health and care providers who wanted to share their work with others and from delegates who registered and attended the sessions. We saw 840 people register for the sessions with over 380 watching the events live and others receiving recordings.

Key themes across the week

With such a rich array of presentations and showcases, four key themes emerged from across the week:

Harnessing the power of technology and digital services relies on understanding the needs of the people using them and on their ability to make the most of them

Rosie Atkin spoke about how Connected Nottinghamshire are addressing social and digital inclusion, whilst Ian Roddis set out a powerful story of how Kettering General Hospital NHS Trust have worked with patients and relatives to develop a service to enable relatives and carers to virtually visit their loved ones in hospital. Building on this, Dr Ben Rogers from Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust described how he and his team continue to co-produce the Bestie app (which aims to improve access to mental health support) with young people.

Digital is vital to support joined up care and just as important in care homes

The care home setting requires a comprehensive digital solution covering devices, new ways of working, the digital literacy needed to achieve them and critically an effective support model to underpin it. Alicia Dunsby and James Daniels described how Hereford and Worcestershire CCG have responded to each of these, whilst Theo Jarratt from Lincolnshire County Council described their approach to remote monitoring and how it has been received by care home residents.

Outcomes, rather than deliverables, are the most important thing

The outcomes being strived for are strikingly similar across health and care systems and settings. Examples of these shared outcomes are:

• Supporting clinical and care decisions with the right information, at the right time and in the right place
• Improving access to health and care services and people’s experience of them
• Joining up and improving care pathways
• Reducing isolation and inequity of service provision

At the East Midlands AHSN, we host a Digital Health and Care Forum, where health and care stakeholders share their outcome goals and the digital innovations that have supported them to achieve them. We’d welcome any East Midlands health and care colleagues to join if they aren’t already a member – get in touch at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

What’s next?

We want to continue to support this commitment to sharing and build on the principle that started the week – “make things open, it makes things better”. We have started to think about what events we can design and deliver to build on the success of the week and continue to share, link people up and have conversations that drive transformation.

Thank you to everyone who worked on the event and joined in on each of the days across the week. All of your efforts help develop the networks that are needed to sustain the digital transformations that are and will be critical to help the health and care sectors respond, reset and recover from COVID-19.

Authors

Mike Watson, Digital Lead