Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital

Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital (BWCH) is one of the first Trusts of its type in the UK. Formed in February 2017, and consisting of over 5,000 staff, it brings together the expertise of Birmingham Women’s Hospital and Birmingham Children’s Hospital to provide healthcare to women, children and families across the region. The Trust operates in three locations in Birmingham and sees over 641,000 visits from patients every year.

BWCH accesses its electronic patient records - Lorenzo and Carenotes, externally. The Trust therefore relies quite heavily on the NHS data network and needs it to be both fast and dependable for services to run efficiently. Previously, BWCH only had a small 50MB circuit running at 99% capacity. This slowed down the network speed and was a strain on the organisation’s digital capability, particularly during peak periods.

With a desire to improve their digital capability as quickly as possible, BWCH decided to migrate directly and independently, rather than as part of the sustainability and transformation partnerships (STP), from the N3 network to the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN).

After looking at the approaches to migration open to them, and discussing a collaborative approach with their STP partners, their desire to move quickly led the BWCH team to run their own procurement and migrate independently. The migration from BT to their chosen provider ADEPT via Convergence was carried out in two phases. The Birmingham Children’s Hospital site migrated in November 2018, with Birmingham Women’s Hospital following in April 2019.

After migrating to HSCN, BWCH quickly began to see huge improvements in their network performance. 

Access speed has improved significantly. The Trust no longer experiences slow speeds and even during peak times (between 7:30 and 9:30am), clinicians are not burdened by network issues and are able to spend more time consulting with their patients rather than waiting for clinical applications to load.

BWCH have run multidisciplinary meetings and some individual consultations using video conferencing technology, something which was not realistic prior to migrating to HSCN. The Trust plans to conduct regular webinars to reach out to the community staff who regularly work offsite, improving staff engagement.

BWCH also has plenty of future objectives to improve patient care which their migration to HSCN helps to facilitate, such as interoperability and mobile working.

BWCH currently work with other healthcare organisations to conduct patient care. For example, it shares inpatient and outpatient paediatric surgeries with the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital. BWCH are therefore looking at using Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) technology - a networking technology - to exchange information across healthcare sites within their STP. This would further streamline patient journeys and also ensure patient safety – all of the relevant clinical staff would have access to the patient data they need at the point of care.  There is now much less reliance on having to contact GP practices directly by telephone for the patient’s notes, resulting in a more efficient service to patients.

Community-based staff employed by BWCH rely on Virtual Private Network (VPN) tokens to securely access primary care services when working remotely. Once these primary care sites also migrate to HSCN, community staff will have faster and more accurate access to systems such as Lorenzo and Carenotes.