NHS - 7000-user Intranet

Client Profile

Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust is a recently merged Trust to form one of the largest NHS teaching Trusts in the United Kingdom with a reputation for excellent staff who provide high quality care from three hospitals:

• Sandwell General Hospital in West Bromwich
• City Hospital in Birmingham
• Rowley Regis Community Hospital in Rowley Regis

Background

The Trust required a system to produce and publish clinical information, and share clinical governance.

A system was developed at Sandwell Hospital that would work according to the standards provided by the Path.Finder Consortium.  The role of the Path.Finder Consortium (consisting of 14 Trusts) is to bring together shared expertise, knowledge and research to promote e-based health information.  It promotes the use of a computer-based system designed to achieve this, in order to share clinical management information on best practice - ultimately promoting both clinical governance and cost effectiveness.

The Trust needed a system that would meet the Consortium standards and provide them with further Intranet functionality, all of which needed to be controlled by non-technical staff based both centrally and throughout the many departments of the trust. The system had to be simple and intuitive to use to encourage buy-in, to enable the Intranet to develop and flourish.

Solution

A Content Management System (CMS) was implemented, allowing the Trust to:

• Control the content for the different departments of the Trust via one system.
• Utilise a roles and privileges-based workflow process, expanding publishing access to contributors within the Trust
• Create consistent navigation throughout the different categories and departments on the Intranet, so that information is simple to find and can be navigated intuitively.
• Create a flexible, extensible system.

The use of XML was an essential part of the new system. XML allows the structuring of data, making it easy for a computer to generate and read that data. As the Trust would be generating an extraordinary amount of content, XML enabled the content to be tagged from a metadata schema (a set list of keywords and phrases), effectively placing the content in context.

Due to the short learning curve and the simplicity and stability of the system, the buy-in by staff throughout the various departments of the trust has been significant.

The site includes clinical guidelines, home pages for departments and services, information for patients (leaflets and support group web sites), knowledge resources (web site links, on-line journals, library holdings), and clinical governance information (clinical effectiveness, clinical risk & training).

The content on the Intranet reflects the processes of the Trust, and has proved to be invaluable for sharing of information within the trust.  It has also been utilised as a useful training and teaching tool for both new and existing staff.