An innovative healthcare project run by a Provide Community in Norfolk, has won a regional award for Excellence in Urgent and Emergency Care in the 2023 NHS Parliamentary Awards.
The project developed by Provide Community, known as the Child Health Information Service (CHIS), focuses on enhancing information triage in children’s Accident and Emergency (A&E) services.
The CHIS project, nominated by James Wild, MP for North West Norfolk will now go forward as a shortlisted entry for the national awards, due to be held on Wednesday, July 5 in Westminster.
The project addresses a significant challenge faced by A&E services in Norfolk – manually processing over 1000 paper notifications per week to identify children in need of clinical review and support. The paper-focused process resulted in delays and resource-intensive efforts.
To combat this issue, innovation from Provide Community’s CHIS, collaborating across Trusts and digitising the process has transformed outcomes for children, families and services. The availability of attendance data to clinicians has been reduced from three months to less than 48 hours and has saved thousands of clinical and administration hours.
Chris Wright, director of IT and transformation at Provide Community who led the project said: “We are very proud to be the regional winner and a finalist for the NHS Parliamentary Awards. We have seen exceptional teamwork across CHIS services and from our clinical colleagues at Cambridgeshire Community Services NHS Trust to get such rapid and outstanding outcomes.
“One of our aims was to help improve services in other areas by sharing our technology and learnings and we are already seeing adoption in Cambridgeshire, Essex and Suffolk.”
The CHIS project will now compete with other regional winners from across the country for a national award, due to be presented at a ceremony in Westminster, London, on Wednesday, July 5.
