Over the last few months, we’ve collected a range of quotes from case studies, videos and news releases from representatives across the Dorset Care Record partnership:
Dr Tim Shaw, consultant physician, Royal Bournemouth Hospital
The Dorset Care Record will give health and social care professionals the greatest chance at avoiding preventable healthcare problems, reducing hospital admissions and ensuring you have the right care and support you need.
Dr Ben Chennell, Weymouth GP and Chair of the Dorset Care Record Programme Board
There has tended to be a lack of communication between health and social care with the tendency for both to sit in silos, making it more difficult to access information. I believe this is a really exciting time. The Dorset Care Record will reduce the amount of time needed looking for information across the health and social care world. It will make patient care much safer and will be a key enabler for safeguarding.
And it will hopefully reduce the amount of consultation time and the amount of bureaucracy that we face on a day to day basis.
Peter Gill, Director of Informatics, The Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospital
So how does the Digitally Transformed Dorset initiative deliver on the Department of Health’s projections going forward? Some benefits in terms of care quality, operational efficiency and financial sustainability are already being realised while others are as yet a gleam in our eye. One thing our experience over the past two years has made clear is that data sharing across common platforms are the key and collaboration and consolidation is the way to achieve them.
Ali Crabbe, Head of Dorset County Hospital Bridport Midwivery team
Having the Dorset Care Record available will be a real step forward. There have been so many times when I’ve had to go back to the GP and ask for further information.
Kate Crabb, Dorset Adult Integrated Respiratory Service (DAIRS)
The Dorset Care Record will provide us with online integration with primary care so that we can all see and use the same system. It will help primary care too because they can’t see what we are up to either.
Dr Craig Wakeham, Cerne Abbas GP and CCIO Dorset CCG
The Dorset Care Record will enhance treatment and save lives.
We need to support this and I see it helping in many areas of care, particularly in supporting people with long-term medical conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, asthma and epilepsy, to name but a few and this would be a really good outcome for patients.
Anya De Iongh, Dorset HealthCare self-management coach
Once healthcare professionals become confident at using the care record and patients can contribute to it, it will be easier for people to feel in control of their healthcare and be more confident about what they need to do themselves.
Dr Michael Wheble, Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospital Acute Medical Unit Consultant
The Dorset Care Record will not only benefit us in terms of saving time and providing more accurate and consistent care but also GPs and social services. The system needs to talk to each other and the Dorset Care Record will benefit social care practitioners providing them with transparent and robust information.
Dr Jo Taylor, Dorset County Hospital Consultant Nephrologist (renal unit)
The Dorset Care Record will provide accurate details about medications that have been prescribed.
David Wheeler, Bournemouth Borough Council Business Engagement Officer
I have just got off the test record and it’s even better than I thought. There is certainly a lot of information including lists of allergies etc which is likely to be very useful.
Dr Andrew Polkinghorn, Verwood GP
Using the Dorset Care Record is wonderfully simple and is a great achievement. It compares favourably with other GP and primary care systems.
Mike Sinclair, Dorset County Hospital Chief Information Officer
The Dorset Care Record was very well received by hospital clinicians when it went live. Being able to see important information relating to the care and treatment people are receiving from their GP has proven really useful in order to support the Emergency Department in caring for people when they come into the hospital as an emergency.
We anticipated the wider health economy will also benefit from seeing alerts and encounter information from the hospital when this next phase goes live.
Knowing what treatment people have received in hospital, along with what special considerations might need to be taken into account for an individual, will help make sure that targeted and safer care is provided by different teams across the county
Claire Collett, Dorset County Council Occupational Therapist with the North Dorset Locality Team
We had an enquiry where there seemed to be no diagnosis for the lady in question but we had been told she was on medication supporting a diagnosis. I was able to go on the DCR to see if there was an official diagnosis and I was able to see the lady’s medical history regarding recent falls, which was quite useful. It was a case of being able to use the system in real time. It allowed us to analyse whether the enquiry was appropriate for adult services and signpost the enquirer in a more timely way – otherwise we would have had to make several more telephone calls to gather more information – which would have been more time consuming.
Carole Jones, Dorset County Council Adult and Community Services Case Worker
The hospital team gather information to complete assessments from many sources; from the client, the ward staff, therapy staff and GP from case notes in Mosaic. The Dorset Care Record will enable us to view most of the data in one place, and particularly with complex cases, will assist use providing timely and seamless discharges for clients in hospitals.
The Dorset Care Record will also be a useful additional resource and, as it develops, I am sure we will discover further benefits to help us in our roles.
Borough of Poole early adopter – Adult and Community Services
I broke the seal on a record on a Friday which was very useful. There was an adult that we were worried might be in danger due to care workers not being able to gain entry because of the adverse weather. I noticed that there was an alert on CareDirector that the adult was in hospital but I accessed DCR and confirmed that the adult was not still in hospital so could still be at risk. This was a lot easier than having to call up the hospital or GP teams, and saved us a lot of crucial time. In the end, the adult was OK, but in different circumstances being able to access DCR could have had a big positive impact in efforts to safeguard.