Digital Transformation and sustainability
The Trust’s technology investment continued to be driven by sustainability matters. Where possible we bought remanufactured technology and have reduced our carbon contribution by working with our supplies. For every remanufactured laptop we bought last year we saved 190,000 litres of water and 316kg of CO2, per device.
The Trust bought over 500 devices and to add to the savings in emissions our provider planted five trees for every device we bought.
Our continued move to cloud base technology utilised modern environmental efficient technology and removed wasted packaging, distribution costs and CO2 emissions.
The Trust followed our five-year digital strategy, which focussed on front line digitisation aligned to NHSEI’s ‘What Good Look Likes’ with additional funding provided from the universal technology fund aimed at levelling up all NHS organisations.
The Trust continued to work towards the NHS’s plan to enable higher levels of digital utilisation across EEAST. Our digital teams continued to be invested in with additional colleagues joining with recruitment continuing in the new financial year.
The Trust finalised a number of key digital improvement programmes including:
- The delivery of our new digital 999 call handling platform now in use across our three Ambulance Operation Centres
- The Ambulance Operation Centres have had the key application rehosted in new and modern resilience computer environment, for both hosting the platforms and our individual workstations
- Our networks were updated to remove old slow connections to all our facilities
- We completed the roll-out of an iPAD based electronic patient and care record across EEAST, which enabled records ‘on scene’ to be captured electronically and passed to hospitals in our region. This will continue on a phased delivery basis for hospitals outside of the region over the next year.
- The piloting in Norfolk and Waveney of accessing summary care records, child protection information, national records for mental health and end of life care from iPADs give colleagues access to NHS spine connected services on the move
- Our data lake programme, one of the first of this type in the NHS, is nearing its halfway point and is a key element in the provision of data as one version of the ‘truth’ which will feed all data and reports produced and used in the Trust.
- To support our colleagues, we started the implementation of body worn cameras to enable their personal protection.
- By using video conferencing systems we began to assess the positive impact on the Trust’s carbon footprint.
- The IT analytics team by using Power BI software has developed a bespoke sustainable dashboard to monitor objectives and improvements made in decarbonising our fleet.