Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) is a diverse mental health service covering nine major sites with 4000 staff and also covers a huge geographical area (3500 square miles; which is 7%, or just over 1/14th, of the whole of England) with a low density of population. This creates numerous logistic and clinical problems.

Central to all of its initiatives is the desire to create a healthcare system that promotes the flow of information from the Trust's core services of mental health, IAPT and substance misuse and integrates that flow of information into partner organisations, third sector, primary and secondary care settings as well as Acute services.

The delivery of an integrated patient record that will take feeds from both the Trust’s PAS and EPR estate and tertiary systems, as well as external systems feeds, from pathology, social care, community and GP systems. This will ensure clinicians based in all care settings will have access to the right information at the right time to enable them to have a richer, clearer picture of our service users, enabling them to make sound clinical judgements which will reduce clinical risk and support efficiencies when seeing patients as all clinical information will be in one place.

In addition to this is the ability for the Trust to share, through this technology platform, clinically pertinent information with service users and carers that will involve them directly in the care and the decisions that will need to be made, but also gives them a mechanism to participate in their care.

The solution will be delivered through 3 mechanisms, for internal staff this will be through a clinical portal viewed through our intranet, which will integrate with existing clinical workflows and applications.

Healthcare professionals within our geographic area of responsibility will be able to access the clinical information through a professional portal that will contain e-referral, clinical guidance and signposting as well as the clinical portal.
 
Our service users and carers will have a similar portal tailored to their needs, with access to appropriate clinical information pertinent to their care, this could include e-CBT, chat and IM functionality, additional self-help material as well as access to personal budget information. ​