Artificial Intelligence, remote consultations and even robots will be increasingly used to support face-to-face contact in Staffordshire’s health and social care system.
The county’s public health leader is calling for a debate on the increasing use of technology in providing health and social care for the county’s ageing population.
Worldwide, life expectancy and ageing‐related disorders as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) are increasing, having a rising impact on patients’ quality of life and caregivers’ distress. Telemedicine offers many possibilities, such as remote diagnosing and monitoring patients.. To read the full article, log in using your MPFT NHS OpenAthens details.
Driving improvement through technology’ includes examples from across health and social care. These range from apps that help people to take more control of their care, to digital systems for sharing care records.
Technology in health and care services is growing in importance. Digitally-enabled care can offer significant benefits to people who use services and those who run and deliver them.
These case studies illustrate some of the developments in use and testing.
Helps manufacturers and healthcare professionals understand the definition of assistive technology and the difference between medical devices and aids to daily living.
This online consultation toolkit is an interactive document that provides a range of ideas and options for different professionals, including clinicians, at different points in their implementation journey.
Patients in north Staffordshire are benefitting from advancements in digital technology being used to connect patients with GPs at the click of a button.
The ‘Skype to Care Home’ programme aims to link care home residents and primary care clinicians by conducting video consultations through medium of Skype. There are currently 16 care homes and 12 GP practices in north Staffordshire taking part in the programme.
This report examines the current landscape of data-driven technologies and their applications in mental healthcare, highlighting areas where these tools offer the most potential for the NHS and its patients.
The technology will help patients, especially the elderly, blind and those who cannot access the internet through traditional means, to get professional, NHS-verified health information in seconds, through simple voice commands.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the current application of gamification to apps and technologies for improving mental health and well-being does not align with the trend of positive reinforcement critiqued in the greater health and well-being literature. We also observed overlap between the most commonly used gamification techniques and existing behavior change frameworks.
Background: Telehealth affords rehabilitation professionals opportunities to expand access to intervention for people in rural areas. Complex interventions have not been adapted for remote delivery using mobile health technologies. Strategy training is a complex intervention that teaches clients skills for identifying barriers and solutions to engagement in meaningful activities. Our goal was to adapt the delivery of strategy training for remote delivery using mobile health technology. You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you are requesting.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has enormous potential to improve the safety of healthcare, from increasing diagnostic accuracy,1 to optimising treatment planning,2 to forecasting outcomes of care.3 However, integrating AI technologies into the delivery of healthcare is likely to introduce a range of new risks and amplify existing ones. For instance, failures in widely used software have the potential to quickly affect large numbers of patients4; hidden assumptions in underlying data and models can lead to AI systems delivering dangerous recommendations that are insensitive to local care processes,5 6 and opaque AI techniques such as deep learning can make explaining and learning from failure extremely difficult.7 8 To maximise the benefits of AI in healthcare and to build trust among patients and practitioners, it will therefore be essential to robustly govern the risks that AI poses to patient safety.. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Open access. Implementation of digital monitoring technology systems is considered beneficial for increasing the safety and quality of care for residents in nursing homes and simultaneously improving care providers’ workflow. Co-creation is a suitable approach for developing and implementing digital technologies and transforming the service accordingly. This study aimed to identify the facilitators and barriers for implementation of digital monitoring technology in residential care for persons with dementia and wandering behaviour, and explore co-creation as an implementation strategy and practice.
GeroPsych: The Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychiatry Vol. 32, Iss. 2, (2019): 79-92. DOI:10.1024/1662-9647/a000203
Models of the use of assistive technologies (ATs) have only moderate value for predicting older people’s actual use of ATs. To find further predictors, we performed a systematic literature review and – applying an action-theoretical approach – a metasynthesis of seven qualitative studies about the reasons older people use or fail to use ATs. We found 25 reasons referring to user’s beliefs and desires (e.g., related to demand, act of using ATs, its consequences), 18 of which were not contained in existing AT use models. Some reasons generalized across ATs (e.g., perceived unreliability), whereas others (e.g., privacy concerns, desire to avoid burden to others) appeared specific to telealarm or smart-home technology. We discuss findings with respect to improving AT use models and developmental counseling.. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Conclusions: It is unlikely that changes in physical activity were related to the ageing process given the relatively short time span of the study. Thus it can be inferred that participants viewed their mobility scooter as a vehicle for maintaining their lifestyle rather than as a means to seek out additional activities. Improvements to perceived quality of life may be attributed to continuing or furthering community and social engagement, and a sense of retained independence. You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please be clear which article you are requesting.
NHS doctors and nurses are using Skype to help older people get faster care, reduce avoidable ambulance call-outs and help people stay out of hospital.
The on-call Skype NHS team takes around 8,000 calls a year from wardens working in sheltered accommodation, care home staff and community teams looking for expert support for their residents.
Scheme running in Tameside (Greater Manchester).
Free access. Patient activation, defined as an individual’s knowledge, skill and confidence in managing their health and healthcare, is recognised as a critical aspect of high-quality, patient-centred and safe healthcare.1 In 2004, Judith Hibbard and colleagues published their seminal work on the development of a validated, objective measure of patient activation.1 The Patient Activation Measure (PAM) was designed to assess patient self-reported knowledge, skills and confidence for managing one’s health or chronic illness. The original 22-item PAM was subsequently shortened to a 13-item version and was found to be both reliable and valid for assessing patient activation.2 Patient activation has the potential to reduce healthcare costs, optimise healthcare utilisation, enhance population health by encouraging healthy behaviours and improve patient outcomes and satisfaction.3–5
Lina Gega explores a review of digital technology for health promotion, which looks at opportunities to address excess mortality in people living with SMI.
What are the fundamental challenges facing policy-makers who want to see the widescale adoption of effective digital technology in the health and care system?
Muna Dubad on a qualitative analysis of young adults’ perspectives of a smartphone app, which is designed for people recently diagnosed with schizophrenia
The results show that social robots are evident to be able to engage with older people with dementia at home. You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please be clear which article you are requesting.
Open access. Hospital-treated deliberate self-harm (DSH) is common, costly and has high repetition rates. Since brief contact interventions (BCIs) may reduce the risk of DSH repetition, we aim to evaluate whether a SMS (Short Message Service) text message Intervention plus Treatment As Usual (TAU) compared to TAU alone will reduce hospital DSH re-presentation rates in Western Sydney public hospitals in Australia.
Conclusions: Despite a strong common-sense belief that the Digi-PIP ingredients are key to sustainable care in the face of the silver tsunami, research has failed to produce evidence for this. We found that interventions reflect a reductionist paradigm, which forces care workers into standardized narrowly focused interventions for complex problems. There is a paucity of studies that meet complex needs with digitally supported flexible and adaptive teamwork.
This paper describes a framework for developing a national cloud-based system of AT outcomes measurement that emerged from structured discussions with clinicians, researchers, and manufacturers. You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you are requesting.
Conclusion: All children reported some impact on their body and self and/or in some activities after the use of the suit. The parents also saw improvements during the trial period. However, the results are inconclusive and a larger study is needed to determine if the suit is useful from a longer perspective and whether it can affect activity and participation in daily activities for children with spasticity. You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you are requesting.
Imperial College London have announced a £20million centre to develop technologies to create dementia-friendly homes.
The care research and technology centre joins six national discovery science centres that collectively make up the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI).
The “Healthy Homes” project aims to help dementia patients live in the comfort of their own home for as long as possible.
The centre will use a range of approaches, including artificial intelligence, robotics and sleep monitoring, to create safer homes.
The problem of staff shortages in social care, paired with the developments in artificial intelligence technology, seems to point to a simple solution: implementing care robots. Jo Stephenson and Claire Acklam explore the legal implications of this. To read the full article, log in using your MPFT NHS OpenAthens details
The Emergency Nurse Practitioner and Clinical Nurse Lead for Digital Health at Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust (TGICFT) led the implementation of a digital service that has significantly reduced avoidable admissions to the emergency department (ED), improved experiences for nursing and residential home service users and staff, as well as improved use of resources locally.
Conclusions: People in Cornwall became more ready to adopt eHealth services, increasing both their personal ability to use eHealth and their methods of access. The implementation of Superfast may have contributed to this; we are certain that our other 2 interventions did not. This increased eHealth readiness did not cause a larger digital divide. The study illustrates the complexity of conducting a randomized controlled trial to assess the impact of interventions at regional, practice, and household levels. Our method may be of use to others.
Conclusions: Use of the app-based treatment program for SUI empowered the women in this study and helped them self-manage their incontinence treatment. They appreciated the app as a new tool for supporting their motivation to carry through a slightly challenging PFMT program.
with the support from BT and Simeon Yates from the University of Liverpool, we did some research.
Its aim was simple:
To better understand the specific reasons people in the UK give for being offline, in greater depth and granularity than currently available research.
Today we have launched our findings.
Conclusions: Many technology-based medication adherence and monitoring interventions have been studied across psychiatric disease contexts. Interventions that are useful in one psychiatric disorder may be useful in other disorders, and further research is necessary to elucidate the specific effects of individual intervention components
Findings suggest that combining an automated electronic health record system to identify at-risk patients with a tailored mHealth protocol can provide education to this population. While this intervention was insufficient to effect behavioral change resulting in better hypertension control, it does suggest that this FQHC population will engage in low-cost population health applications with a potentially promising impact
Avatar‐based virtual reality therapy is an emerging digital technology that can be used to assist the treatment of common mental health problems. This may be particularly appealing to young people who are highly familiar with digital technologies and may provide a medium to facilitate communication within face‐to‐face therapy.. To read the full article, log in using your NHS Athens details. To access full-text: click “Log in/Register” (top right hand side). Click ‘Institutional Login’ then select 'OpenAthens Federation', then ‘NHS England’. Enter your Athens details to view the article.
'Crisis cards' that you scan with a smartphone to download an app that provides support via an augmented reality human. Being trialled in Liverpool by a crisis service.
Aim: To describe telenurses’ experiences of difficult calls.
Design: A qualitative approach with a descriptive design was used to gain a deeper understanding of the telenurses’ experiences. Open Access Article
How do you use information for your work and CPD? What do you think of MPFT library services? Tell us here and you could win £25 vouchers: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/B2JVNPR
An expert in cyber security at the University of York comments on new research from the University of Toronto on the security issues around data sharing by mobile health apps.
Patient care in England would be improved if more mental health services were given access to significant levels of dedicated funding to support digital innovation.
That is one of the recommendations made in Using digital technology to design and deliver better mental health services, published today by Rebecca Cotton, director of policy at the Mental Health Network, the voice for NHS-funded mental health and learning disability service providers in England.
Results: The research findings highlight various usability issues, including the complexity of the interface, difficulty in reading the text, and insufficient provision of instructions. These studies have also suggested solutions to enhance the usability of systems, including development of the technical skills of users, explanations of usability evaluation techniques for telecare monitoring systems, and engaging the appropriate users during the development of telecare monitoring systems. You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please be clear which article you are requesting.
Technological innovation offers opportunities to improve mental health care, however, little evidence exists regarding attitudes of inpatient staff and patients to such changes. We present a survey of staff and patients prior to introduction of a digital version of the National Early Warning Score (eNEWS) system for identifying physical deterioration.. To read the full article, log in using your NHS Athens details. To access full-text: click “Log in/Register” (top right hand side). Click ‘Institutional Login’ then select 'OpenAthens Federation', then ‘NHS England’. Enter your Athens details to view the article.
The Nurse Manager in the Mental Health and Vascular Wellbeing Team at North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust (NSCHT) led a programme of work to introduce a digital application (app) into the care and treatment plans for service users at high risk of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI). The app was designed to digitally link the nursing and medical staff with the service user, enabling care closer to home, empowering service users, families and carers to have greater control and input into planning their treatment and care and improving service user experience and outcomes.
Remote activity monitoring may work optimally for caregivers of persons living with ADRD in specific situations (e.g., earlier stages of dementia; wandering risk), which suggests the need for appropriate needs assessments that can better target such innovations. Please contact the library to receive a copy of this article - http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
Social robots appear to have the potential to improve the well-being of older adults, but conclusions are limited due to the lack of high-quality studies. More RCTs are recommended with larger sample sizes and rigorous study designs. Please contact the library to receive a copy of this article - http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
Conclusions: Mental health service recipients currently use general functions such as listening to music and calling friends to support recovery. Nevertheless, they reported interest in trying more specific illness-management apps.
Shortlisted projects include Adult Safeguarding Enquiry cards, Integrated Community Services Team, Social Prescribing, Broseley Project for work using consumer smart technology to support health and social care needs of vulnerable people, night time carer support.
Measuring physical activity is complicated particularly in people with dementia, where activity levels are low and subjective measures are susceptible to inaccurate recall. Activity monitors are increasingly being used within research, however, it is unclear how people with dementia view wearing such devices, and what aspects of the device effect wear time. The aim of the study was to evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of people with dementia wearing activity monitors.. To read the full article, log in using your NHS Athens details. To access full-text: click “Log in/Register” (top right hand side). Click ‘Institutional Login’ then select 'OpenAthens Federation', then ‘NHS England’. Enter your Athens details to view the article.
There is a clear public health need to reduce office workers’ sedentary behaviors (SBs), especially in the workplace. Digital technologies are increasingly being deployed in the workplace to measure and modify office workers’ SBs. However, knowledge of the range and nature of research on this topic is limited; it also remains unclear to what extent digital interventions have exploited the technological possibilities.
Open access. This study aimed to understand the attributes of popular apps for mental health and comorbid medical conditions, and how these qualities relate to consumer ratings, app quality and classification by the WHO health app classification framework.
More than £1 million is up for grabs for digital social care projects thanks to funding from NHS Digital.
The Social Care Digital Innovation Programme (SCDIP) aims to support local authorities using digital technology to design and implement social care.
Ten authorities will receive up to £30,000 to design a digital solution to address specific issues within their service.
This article summarises a new framework to improve the success of technology projects: the nonadoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread and sustainability (NASSS) framework. The framework is based on a narrative systematic review and empirical work, and addresses the different domains in technology projects and how different aspects of complexity may be handled in each of them.
Patients are having their observations recorded more accurately, thanks to the swift implementation of a new electronic observations system. 'VitalPAC' assesses and analyses patient vital sign data to identify deterioration in a patient's health and also has the potential to automatically calculate a patient's early warning score (EWS), prompting clinicians to respond in line with hospital protocol. The team responsible for implementation worked tirelessly to make it operational in a record time of four weeks.
The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of the use of a speech generating app via a tablet, as implemented by a caregiver, to increase requesting in an adult with autism spectrum disorder. To read the full article, log in using your MPFT NHS OpenAthens details.
Caregiver and professional responses to an anonymous online survey showed that focus individuals were rated low in terms of independent and self-management skills, with scheduling and planning and communication identified as desirable future AT functions. Overall, positive experiences of AT were reported, with AT use more than doubling in recent years. You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please be clear which article you are requesting.
Objective: The objective of this study is to understand the barriers and facilitators to effectively access and continuously use essential assistive products for people with intellectual disabilities. You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please be clear which article you are requesting.
A new report is highlighting how technology, including social media, is helping patients in Staffordshire take control of their health.
The ‘Spotlight on Digital Health’ is now available on North Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent CCGs’ websites.
Many people are now living with long-term conditions such as diabetes or heart conditions. These need to be monitored regularly and lifestyle changes often need to be made to help. This is increasingly being done through app-based technology using a patient’s own mobile phone.
A study using funding from The Good Things Foundation has provided insight into how local people use the technology available.