Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust

As a result of the time-sensitive pressures from both the NHS England deadline of March 2023 to have an LFPSE-compliant incident reporting system in place and coming to the end of a previous contract, as their previous supplier only offered a three year extension or nothing at all, Bedfordshire Hospitals decided to look for a new supplier.

“It was very obvious from early on that InPhase was the one for us,”

Simon Howard, Senior Quality Governance Systems and Informatics Coordinator for Bedfordshire explains.

“It’s intuitive, which is great.” Simon added, “a better user interface with a better user experience.”

Thanks to the breadth of procurement frameworks InPhase is on and our close work with the procurement team at Bedfordshire Hospitals, the procurement process was completed in just under a week. On the procurement and implementation phase, Simon notes “it’s been easy working with InPhase If we wanted to ask them a question, we’d ask them and they’d come back quickly and they’d find a solution for it.” Bedfordshire highlighted the responsiveness, honesty and can-do attitude of the customer support team at InPhase, who were focused on bringing the rapid migration aspirations into reality.

Bedfordshire choose to implemented more than just LFPSE. A number of apps from the Oversight range of modular apps were procured, bringing together incident, risk registers, feedback, claims, safeguarding, mortality, and audits to start, and with more apps in mind for quality, projects and performance further down the line.

“With InPhase, it’s all within the system so it’s much easier to see at a glance what’s going on.” Oversight from InPhase provides one integrated solution for users. “This is another good thing about InPhase: there’s one solution for everything.” Users can choose from several InPhase apps to build a custom system that’s suited specifically to their needs.

With the aid of Question Manager within Incident Oversight from InPhase, Bedfordshire was able to migrate two incumbent Datix systems, one at each hospital with the addition of localised questions to harmonise Bedfordshire and Luton & Dunstable to build one, single LFPSE approved form. Due to the extremely short migration timeline, it left little to no room for initial staff training. However, due to the incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use nature of the system and the new form, there was no drop-off in incident reporting at the point of implementation.

Robert Buddle explains,

“we compared the number of incidents that were reported on Datix for the first 2 weeks of October with the following 2 weeks when we went live with the LFPSE forms with InPhase Incident Oversight and there was no difference or drop off, even with the fact that because of the really short implementation time we didn’t have a lot of time for front end user training on the LFPSE form on our new InPhase system. We ran with it and continued to report at the same rate, with no significant difference at all, it was really quite impressive".

The question manager is fully customisable, giving users the ability to add any localised questions that they require alongside the mandatory LFPSE taxonomy. It’s quick and easy for users to adapt their forms down the line at any time. “The form design is fantastic. You just type in your questions and decide whether you want them to be a date or a multi-form drop-down or whatever.”

As well as this, Bedfordshire was able to streamline the workflows, something they had been looking for in a new system. “This is the great thing – you can build workflows on each form. That just gives you that flexibility. You don’t need to have another app, you can do it all in that one app.”

Training for power users and their teams occurred as the implementation process happened, with the InPhase team delivering daily training sessions in the run up to go live. However, Bedfordshire found that most of their staff were able to intuitively use the system after logging in, leading to excellent user feedback. “It’s super flexible and super easy to pick up, there are loads of powerful capabilities in there. It’s all in one place at one time, which makes things much quicker to do,” Robert Buddle, EX-Datix Risk Management Systems Administrator, added.

As Simon put it, the InPhase team “pulled out all the stops”, completing data transfers, user accounts and permissions set-up, all historic incident data and forms from Datix to Oversight, making Bedfordshire one of the first 10 NHS Trusts to migrate to a live LFPSE system, with go-live happening on the 17th of October 2022, a staggering 5 weeks and 1 day after the procurement was finalised.

Bedfordshire Hospitals implementation team are incredibly happy with their choice of LFPSE-certified incident reporting system and confident in Incident Oversight from InPhase. As Oversight supports both concurrent and future upgrades of any apps within our suite of over 20 fully integrated and configurable apps, their next steps are to include additional apps to their current system. These apps work together to form the ultimate single, triangulated solution.

For more information on how you can replicate the success of Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, speak to a member of the InPhase team today.