Environmental Sustainability Award

Environmental Sustainability Need

The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust highlighted a need in their community services to provide a more sustainable approach to data capture. A 185 nurses work in the community using an ageing paper process. Change was required to improve sustainability, reducing emissions, and streamlining workflow.

The aim was to enable wider access to a portable digital system for clinicians in the field. To reduce their need to travel back to the hospital for data input and reduce paper use. The NHS Long Term Plan set out a commitment to deliver a new service models for the 21st century. It included a focus on sustainability and reduced emissions. Multiple commitments and initiatives were introduced including, boosting “out of hospital care” and digitally enabling primary and outpatient care.

Working with the Royal Wolverhampton Community Teams, Head of the ICT Department, and the Digital Sustainability Department, Bantham Technologies were tasked to develop their existing digital form data capture platform. In addition, develop a new system, the Patient Information Database (PID) to integrate with the Trusts existing Electronic Patient Records to meet the growing needs of their trust. Thus assisting them to implement changes, allowing the community nurses to work more sustainably.

Environmental Sustainability Results 

It was vitally important to the trust to work towards a more sustainable way of working as laid out in their Green Plan. And to develop new ways of working that could be executed with minimal disruption. 185 nurses are now using the solution, processing on average 18,000 digital forms a month. This saves approximately 80,000 A4 sheets of paper, 29 tonnes of Co2 and an incredible 800,000 litres of water. This environmental data is now reported to the trust quarterly as part of their Sustainability reporting.

The Community Nurses at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust now use digital forms such as: 

1. Patient Manual Handling
2. Pain Assessment
3. Initial Clinic Assessment
4. Community Therapy Assessment
5. Community Patient Risk Assessment
6. Catheter Change Record
7. Leg Ulcer Core Care Plan

Digitalising these forms enable data capture to be more uniform. This is achieved with the use of drop-down menus, tick boxes and key selection buttons. All the features in the forms were designed so nurses could effectively capture data that the trust required on each patient with ease and efficiency. When a form is completed, it is instantly sent back to base preventing unnecessary travel, reducing admin time to re enter data into the Electronic Patient Records (EPR) and reducing space require to hold paper records.

The Environmental Benefits

The benefits of the new digital data capture supported by the new Patient Information Database (PID) has exceeded all expectation. The value it has added to The Royal Wolverhampton Trust has been immense. It meets the requirements laid out in their Green Plan and their ICT Digital Strategy. One of the aims in the Green Plan under ‘A digital, low-carbon transformation,’ was a move away from paper, and to keep in line with the Digital First agenda. For the Community Nurses, this has been achieved.

The results produced over quarter 2 for 2022 the 185 community nurses at The Royal Wolverhampton Trust have seen:

• A4 sheets of Paper Saved – 225,083
• Litres of Water Saved – 2,250,826
• Tonnes of CO2 Saved – 86.36
• Total Number of Digital Forms Processed – 48,931

The Community Nurses at Royal Wolverhampton Trust have embraced a new digital way of working. Their dedication and determination has been clearly demonstrated by their effective use of the digital form. This transformation has played a huge part in reducing emissions for the trust whilst out working in the community.