Well-known digital nurse leader @AnnieCoops looks forward to joining a leading forum for debate on the big issues shaping health tech and the digital health industry
Highland Marketing has welcomed a digital nurse leader to its advisory board of NHS IT professionals and health tech industry experts.
Anne Cooper, known as @anniecoops to her many social media followers, has joined the expert group that acts as a forum for the discussion of issues affecting digital health, and provides advice to the agency and its clients.
Anne helped to develop the NHS’ first, nurse-led telephone helpline, NHS Direct, and went on to hold senior positions at the Department of Health Informatics Directorate, NHS England, and NHS Digital.
She retired as deputy clinical director and chief nurse at NHS Digital in 2018 and turned her attention to consulting and supporting SMEs with a social remit.
She is chair of Ethical Healthcare Consulting CIC and works with Thrive by Design a multi-disciplinary team hosted by Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust who specialise in inclusive co-design projects and programmes.
She is also a non-executive director of the Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust. Anne acknowledged that with so many calls on her time, she thought carefully before agreeing to join the Highland Marketing advisory board.
However, she said: “I wanted to be involved because of the quality of the people on the board. I wanted to stay connected to some of the big brains in the industry, to have the chance to debate the issues of the day with such a knowledgeable and influential group, and to have some fun in the process.
“I love talking to people and I’m convinced it’s the only way to get a real understanding of the challenges that are facing healthcare and the role that technology can play in addressing them.
“I see the advisory board as a think-tank or sounding board for doing that, and for helping Highland Marketing and its clients to positively shape the health tech industry so it can deliver the innovation the NHS so badly needs.”
Jeremy Nettle, chair of the Highland Marketing advisory board, said: “As the health and care system emerges from the Covid-19 pandemic, it is facing a new set of challenges; from addressing waiting lists to implementing new models of care.
“The advisory board meets regularly to discuss these challenges and to make a frank assessment of how digital policy and the health tech industry can contribute to addressing them.
“Anne’s experience as a nurse and long-standing advocate for technical innovation will add a valuable dimension to our discussions. We’re looking forward to some robust debates and some frank advice about how to shape the digital future.”
Susan Venables, founder and client services director at Highland Marketing, said: “We have watched and admired Anne’s work for many years, and we’re delighted to have found an opportunity to recruit her to the advisory board.
“Our longstanding ambition is to find ‘health tech to shout about’ and to tell people working in health and care about digital ideas, companies and products that can transform services for the better.
“Anne will bring a new perspective to our industry, the advice we give to our clients and the communications that we develop on their behalf. We’re very much looking forward to working with her as the NHS moves into a new phase of digital development.”
The Highland Marketing advisory board meets regularly to discuss issues around healthcare IT. It also acts a sounding board for the agency’s content, marketing and PR teams and for strategic clients.
The invasion of Ukraine has resulted in a large number of new sanctions by many countries against leading politicians, businesspeople, and entities in both Russia and Belarus.
The UK has been one of a number of states leading the way in imposing sanctions, and as the fighting continues the number of those being sanctioned by the British government is increasing fast.
For those in the public sector, and in fact any sector, it’s not easy to keep up with the plethora of sanctions being announced – which they are legally required to adhere to.
The best way to ensure compliance with sanctions is by having access to sanctions lists, also called watchlists. For a long time these lists have played a vital role in ensuring those in the public sector effectively undertake know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks when onboarding people to use their services. The lists have also been used to run regular cross-checks against those on their existing databases.
Failing to properly assess for sanctions could see public sector organisations facing hefty fines. Also, they are likely to experience significant brand damage resulting from the negative publicity associated with providing services to someone who’s been sanctioned.
To ensure compliance with the new sanctions triggered by the conflict in Ukraine a best practice approach to KYC and AML is essential.
Source sanctions data from trusted global sources
The most important first step to ensure adherence with the latest sanctions data is to obtain an up-to-date sanctions list. Ideally, it’s accessed as part of an automated tool that collects and synthesises sanctions data from a wide range of trusted sources worldwide, such as governments, regulators, and credit agencies. It should also continually scan for updates and deliver them in real-time. This way it’s possible for the organisation to provide a smooth user experience for those signing up for services – something many people expect in the digital age. Taking an automated approach is also a much more efficient and accurate way to deliver sanctions checks. Undertaking manual checks, for example using search engines, could leave your organisation exposed to sanctions breaches and the associated cost in fines and to your reputation, quite apart for the large cost of employing staff to carry out such checks.
PEP screening
It’s not enough to solely have access to sanctions data. Organisations must obtain politically exposed persons (PEP) data from around the world as part of a wider best practice approach to sanctions checks, KYC and AML compliance. A PEP is defined as ‘an individual who is or has been entrusted with a prominent public function’ and it is ideal to screen for them in the early stages of any onboarding activity. Along with PEPs those in the public sector require access to details of relatives and close associates (RCAs) of PEPs, as well as those sanctioned. It’s because there is a tendency for these groups to be involved in or drawn into crime. In the UK, financial organisations have a legal requirement to undertake enhanced checks of both domestic and foreign PEPs.
Adverse media checks are vital
Monitoring the latest news and alerts in real-time, not only for those facing sanctions, but also PEPs and anyone else who could have potential negative regulatory, financial, or reputational consequences to their organisation, is essential. Compliance teams must remain up to date on any new information regarding the status of those using their services. This requires organisations in the public sector to augment their standard sanctions and PEP screening process with checks on adverse media and negative news. These tools scan the global news media, sourcing information on those with new sanctions against them, and where legal cases are pending.
Sanctions training for compliance staff
Suitable training and guidance must be provided for compliance staff who are on the front line when it comes to acting on the sanctions data. As well as having a clear understanding of the latest sanctions measures, they must know how to handle those individuals that are impacted by the sanctions.
Systems and controls
Are your organisation’s onboarding and payment screening platforms able to act on those who have been sanctioned? And once these individuals have been detected in your database, do you have the systems in place to block transactions and quickly freeze funds? Identifying those who have been sanctioned is only half the battle. The next stage requires having processes in place to immediately act on this information.
Undertake a broader approach with automated identity verification
An automated tool that in real-time sources those on disparate sanctions lists, including PEPs and RCAs, works well as part of a more comprehensive approach to automated KYC and AML operations. This includes using electronic identity verification (eIDV) that can cross-check user-provided details against reputable data streams to ensure they are who they say they are in real-time. Additionally, when onboarding, implementing document scanning with optical character recognition (OCR) and machine readable zone (MRZ) technology enables those in the public sector to instantly and accurately determine the authenticity of the ID documents provided online. Because these operations are seamlessly integrated into the onboarding process, the user journey remains smooth and friction-free.
The large number of new sanctions prompted by the conflict in Ukraine highlights why the public sector must have access to continually updated real-time sanctions data, including data on PEPs and RCAs, from governments and regulators worldwide. With automated functionality, these lists can be easily used in conjunction with automated eIDV and document scanning technology for an accurate, quick, and cost-effective KYC and AML process.
For more information about Melissa and how our identity and document verification services can help you prevent fraud please visit: Melissa, email: barley.laing@melissa.com or call: 020 7718 0070.
“LGfL-The National Grid for Learning is set to bolster public sector online defences in response to the National Cyber Security Centre’s alert to act now following Russia’s attack on the Ukraine,” says John Jackson, CEO, whose organisation has stepped up its cybersecurity resilience package to include monitoring, identification, sandboxing1 and the eradication of ever-evolving threats from phishing attempts, malware, hacks, viruses and ransomware. LGfL has provided services to the public sector over many years and is approved by the governing bodies for the Public Service Network (PSN) and Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) to provide secure access to systems across the public sector, including central government systems.
Newly appointed as the only UK Platinum Partner for Malwarebytes, LGfL is using its significant group buying power to supply public sector bodies cybersecurity solutions at significantly discounted prices.
LGfL is also able to offer:
• Endpoint Protection (threat prevention)
• Endpoint Detection and Response (threat prevention, monitoring, sandboxing1, isolation, and rollback2)
• Endpoint Protection for Servers (threat prevention for servers)
• Endpoint Detection and Response for Servers (threat prevention, monitoring, sandboxing, isolation, and rollback for servers).
Using its Malwarebytes OneView console, LGfL will also be able to give third party support organisations (PSOs) greater visibility and control over what is happening across multiple sites. It will also be able to provide full information on licences issued/used through its OneView Portal.
For further information on LGfL’s cybersecurity resilience packages please contact Gareth Jelley at LGfL’s Cybersecurity Centre of excellence via cybersecurity@lgfl.net
1. Sandboxing works by keeping potentially malicious programs or unsafe code isolated from the rest of the organization’s environment. This way, it can be analysed safely, without compromising the operating system or host devices. If a threat is detected, it can be removed proactively.
2. Rollback – rolling back changes to restore a computer to its previous state.
Danny Wilson, head of children’s residential at Bedspace
By Danny Wilson, head of children’s residential at Bedspace
Before the pandemic, Local Authorities in England were already under significant pressure, as budget cuts made the increasing number of children being put into care difficult to manage. Following nearly two years of Covid restrictions and lockdowns the problem has been exacerbated. Now, new analysis predicts that the number of children in care in England could reach almost 100,000 by 20251. This increase will represent a 36 per cent rise in a decade, putting unprecedented pressure on already struggling Local Authorities. Ultimately, the people who will feel this increase most are the vulnerable children in care. The systemic problems that are causing this increase, and the issues created once they are in care, need to be addressed before we reach crisis point.
Why are more children being put into care?
In the past ten years, large cuts to the social care sector have had a huge impact on children. The Local Government Association has proposed that councils in England need £2.7bn more in funding for children in social care by 2024-251. However, as it stands decisions are being made based on what will cut costs, instead of what’s in the best interest of the children who need support. These short-term money saving decisions are leading to more children being put into care and are and causing further problems down the line.
Budget cuts have led to Local Authorities cutting spending on preventative measures, and as a result support for some vulnerable families has decreased. The closure of early intervention support measures, such as community hubs for struggling families, has meant that more vulnerable children are reaching crisis point. Obviously, this negatively impacts the lives of these children, but in the long-term removing this early intervention also costs Local Authorities more, as many children will move into care as a result.
What does the children’s care sector look like now?
As well as the lack of preventative measures there are several other issues that need to be addressed in the children’s care sector.
In my opinion the biggest is lack of forward planning or matching when putting children into care. Short-sighted decisions by Local Authorities, including children being placed in any available home across the country, regardless of where they are from, has led to poorly matched placements which can result in difficult or dangerous incidents and disruption. In worst cases, children who have been taken out of the family home in emergency situations are being placed alongside other children who have similarly been taken out of a crisis. Children coming out of these situations are likely to experience high levels of emotional trauma, and so being placed together in an unfamiliar environment increases the risk of them becoming violent or running away. These incidents not only have a detrimental impact on the child’s wellbeing and future development, but also have knock-on effects for the other children in the home.
Finally, in addition to poor planning, the low budgets Local Authorities are dealing with mean that they are unable to provide the same level of service once a child is put into care. Despite councils increasing budget in the past two years, and eight in 10 councils in England overspending in 2019/2020, the impact of long-term budget cuts mean there’s still not enough funding to provide appropriate care and deal with the ever-increasing demand.2
The pressure relating to cost of placements in children’s homes means that at age 16, children are often rushed into moving on to cheaper alternative accommodation before they are ready. This focus on costs, rather than the child’s wellbeing and the support they need, can undo the progress that a child has made up until that stage. It is well known that the ‘cliff edge’ from children’s homes to adulthood can result in very poor outcomes. The only way to make this process easier to provide intensive support around transitions, or integrated services that enable continuity in order to ensure children to develop successfully.
The rapidly increasing number of children being put into care needs urgent attention. Across a backdrop of austerity and the ongoing impact of the pandemic, young people across the UK are already struggling with increased mental health issues, difficulty building relationships, and are finding it more challenging to find job opportunities. The impact of these challenges for children in care, who do not have a consistent environment or family support proves an even heavier burden.
What can we do to solve the problem?
Firstly, to prevent the rapid increase in the number of children in care, there needs to be a reconsideration of the way decisions are made within Local Authorities. Even with limited budget, decision makers need to invest now in support services within the community to prevent vulnerable children reaching the point where they end up in care. Although investing in support services may seem like a large outgoing, in the long term it not only benefits vulnerable children, but it is also more cost effective for Local Authorities. Housing one child in a children’s home costs approximately £4000-£4500 a week, so investing in preventative measures now is well worth it down the line.
Secondly, is it essential that there are carefully thought-out planning processes in place to match children to the best homes for them and the community, if they are put into care. This planning and risk assessment is especially important before taking children out of crisis situations, as these children are most at risk.
We need to see wider variety of organisations providing residential care homes. Currently, a third of residential care homes are provided by the 10 biggest organisations in the country3, due to the current approach around planning and buying property that favours large corporations. There needs to be a change in this process within the sector to allow smaller organisations to enter the market. Different providers will have different approaches to care. Having a more varied range of providers and more competition in the sector, will not only increased standard of care, but will lead to a diversity of ideas that will support the long-term improvement of the sector.
Finally, and most importantly, it is essential that children’s homes provide a family-like and supportive environment for the children that live there. Children in care must have care pathways that provide a safe and ongoing transition into other areas of support. Providers should work with Local Authorities to constantly review placements and provide a flexible provision of much needed support for these vulnerable children.
For the benefit of both the Local Authorities and the vulnerable children in our communities, we need to act now to solve what is becoming an ever more pressing issue.
Organisations across the public sector are embracing digital transformation, and as a result, IT infrastructure is becoming more complex. On top of significant levels of legacy hardware and software to manage, the addition of various cloud-based services means IT professionals are looking after a diverse set of technologies—from the most current and advanced systems to those in use for many years.
As a result, IT teams must split their time and resources across disparate technologies. To stay in control, many now rely on a variety of management and monitoring tools. Though these tools help them maintain performance and reliability, the quest for simplification means service silos can develop based on the various monitoring capabilities available.
Indeed, the widespread piecemeal monitoring strategies seen across organisations can create major operational blind spots, and on a practical level, they can cause delays in resolving problems and failures. Looking ahead, the danger is IT pros will eventually find it’s no longer possible to fully focus on infrastructure and service modernisation because the complexity inherent in monitoring their existing systems gets in the way.
So how can public sector technology teams balance their digital transformation priorities against the need to deliver effective monitoring across their IT estate? The answer lies in the implementation of full-stack observability, which is designed to deliver an end-to-end monitoring service without the familiar silos and disruptive complexity.
From Monitoring to Observability
Traditional infrastructure and application monitoring tools capture and process telemetry data to allow IT organisations to understand the current state of each relevant component. This then enables teams to understand where systems are operating normally, whether they’re performing outside their normal parameters (or are completely offline), and how the status of each is changing at any given time.
This traditional approach to monitoring tends to focus on a specific network, cloud, or infrastructure component. Ultimately, the role of these tools is to help technology professionals identify and resolve minor and serious problems as soon as possible.
Specifically, these tools employ metrics-oriented dashboards to help IT pros evaluate telemetry data against manually or statistically defined thresholds. Though this provides invaluable insight across public sector organisations, the tools can’t provide cross-domain correlation, service delivery insight, information about operational dependencies, or any useful sense of predictability.
This creates a problem because modern systems are increasingly built around complex multi-cloud environments and increasing levels of telemetry data, meaning there’s an accompanying shortfall in the monitoring insight available.
In contrast, observability goes beyond traditional monitoring by measuring the internal states of systems in their entirety. By offering a more holistic view—from end-user experience to server-side metrics and logs—IT teams can immediately overcome the limitations of their legacy monitoring tools.
Whereas monitoring aggregates and displays data to help assess whether systems are operating as expected, observability draws on these insights and metrics and compares this information with expected outcomes and objectives. This allows IT pros to understand the state of their infrastructure and applications and allows them to eliminate silos.
Observable Improvements
Observability also offers IT organisations scope to improve performance, availability, and digital experience on a continual basis—all while embracing the complexity of today’s increasingly distributed hybrid and cloud tech strategies.
Moreover, full-stack observability isn’t just about IT monitoring, performance, and problem-solving. By delivering actionable insights and intelligence—combined with capabilities such as machine learning and artificial intelligence for IT—it can be applied to historical metrics, logs, and trace data at a huge scale and in real time.
This also helps professionals across ITOps, DevOps, and security teams deliver consistent and well-performing services focused on meeting the needs of users with continuous improvements in productivity and experience.
The bottom-line impact is users, employees, and customers alike get better-performing, more reliable systems to meet their varied needs. This is particularly important for public sector organisations focused on the delivery of digital transformation projects, where minimising complexity is often among the key strategic priorities when modernising systems.
As digital transformation continues apace across focused public sector projects and entire departments alike, observability is increasingly key to enabling the kind of proactivity these systems require to maximise uptime and performance. In this digital-first era, expectations are high, and public confidence in online services will—to a significant degree—depend on how well they perform.
Sajid Javid – Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
Health and social care secretary Sajid Javid has announced a new target to complete the digitisation of the acute sector. The Highland Marketing advisory board discussed the approach being developed by NHS England’s transformation directorate, and the challenges to making it work.
In the first week of February, the Health Service Journal reported that it had seen a PowerPoint presentation of the digital plans being drawn-up by NHS England’s transformation directorate, which is absorbing NHSX and NHS Digital.
The magazine revealed that the directorate wants to see the “universal adoption of electronic patient records” as part of its “foundational vision” and that it wants clinical decision support to become “the norm” for all clinicians.
Just a few weeks later, health and social care secretary Sajid Javid told the HSJ digital transformation summit that he is setting new targets for the adoption of EPRs in England. He said he wants 90% of trusts to be at Level 5 on the HIMSS EMRAM maturity model by December 2023, with the other 10% well on the way to deploying an EPR.
A shift in NHS digital policy
This is a significant shift in focus. The Highland Marketing advisory board held a debate on the future of EPRs last year, because it felt as though NHSX wasn’t particularly interested in completing the digitisation of hospitals.
Yet there have been signs that something like this announcement has been coming. In retrospect, the most significant move was made last March, when NHS England announced that it was making Tim Ferris its director of transformation.
Ferris used to lead the Massachusetts General Physicians Organisation, which in 2016 agreed a $1.2 billion deal for Epic. In October, digitalhealth.net reported that Ferris had been suggesting an even bigger deal: a contract with Epic for a single, national EPR for the entire NHS.
While that was always unlikely, NHSX went on to announce a reboot for the digital aspirant programme that was interesting in two ways. First, Digital Aspirant Plus or DA+ focused on EPRs, and not on the departmental, e-obs, and AI systems that have received digital aspirant funding in recent years.
Second, DA+ comes with central support to procure an EPR and ‘buddying’ support to deploy one. At one level, this looked like a bid to learn the lessons of the global digital exemplar programme, which the National Audit Office has judged a success.
On another, it looked like a bid to give the centre more control over the systems being chosen. Shortly after HSJ reported on Javid’s target, it reported that NHS England has been sending out forms asking integrated care systems about their plans to ‘converge’ local EPRs.
So, twenty years after the National Programme for IT was launched, it looks as though the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England are going to have another go at getting EPRs into every trust, and that they want to do some market shaping in the process.
How much ‘convergence’?
When the Highland Marketing advisory board met towards the end of February, members debated whether the push would work, and the pros and cons of ‘convergence’.
Chair Jeremy Nettle suggested that it looked as though the centre would still like to see Epic everywhere. “The way things are forming up, with the integration of NHSE, X, and D, and the latest announcements, it looks like they’d like a Henry Ford offer: you can have any colour of EPR you like, as long as it’s black!”
However, the reality on the ground is that the landscape is too messy for this to happen. Nicola Haywood-Alexander, system chief information officer at NHS Lincolnshire, pointed out that EPRs are only used by acute trusts; mental health and community providers have their own systems, as do GPs, and they’re not going to rip them up and take them out.
“We’re all discussing what the definition of ‘convergence’ is going to be, and the utopian answer might be ‘one system’ across an ICS, but the pragmatic answer is going to be ‘data’ and systems that allow data to be exchanged with each other,” she said.
Even in the acute sector, trusts that have achieved a high level of digitisation using a mix of single supplier EPRs and other systems, or ‘best of breed’ approaches, are also unlikely to undo the work they have done. But for the large minority of trusts that are still mostly paper-based, adopting the EPR or approach of another member of an acute group, a neighbour, or the majority of trusts in its ICS area, should make sense.
Andy Kinnear, who retired from the NHS after 30-years and now works for Ethical Consulting, said: “In some areas, trusts have been deliberately difficult with their EPR choices. We can all think of cities in which there are three or four trusts and they’ve refused to use a single instance of an EPR, because they think it will make it harder to merge them.
“Any attempt to tackle that kind of behaviour is going to be a good thing, so we can get on with sharing data to do what we’re meant to be doing, which is creating better services for patients.”
The challenges: deployment
If Whitehall and NHS England do use DA+ and the new EPR target to encourage acute trusts to ‘converge’ on systems at an acute group or ICS level, the NHS will end up with a smaller number of single-system suppliers.
As Matthew Swindells pointed out in a recent Highland Marketing interview, that was one of the intentions of the GDE programme, so recent developments can be seen as taking the health service back to where it was before NHSX arrived on the scene. However, Kinnear pointed out that it won’t be enough to guarantee that NHS trusts will be at HIMSS 5 on target.
“We shouldn’t underestimate how hard it is to deploy,” he said. “Fewer products will make your provider landscape a lot more manageable, but it doesn’t make your trust landscape more manageable. Every trust will have its own way of doing booking, or managing transfers from A&E or whatever, and you have to get into all of that.”
Time and leadership
The advisory board identified two additional challenges to getting the 20% of trusts that are still mostly paper-based over the line: timescales and leadership. As Kinnear pointed out: “No matter how many times we’ve tried to do this in England, we’ve failed, and one reason is that we keep announcing new approaches and failing to see them through.
“As soon as it gets tough, we change the national leadership and start again. I think that if we’d stuck with the NPfIT – ok, perhaps not NPfIT, but certainly the GDE programme – we’d be there by now.
“I remember talking to the leaders of the GDE programme when it launched [in 2016], and they said: ‘The Treasury won’t give us the money to put EPRs into the entire NHS, because it doesn’t think we’ll manage to deploy. So, we’re going to do a few trusts, to prove that we can do it, and then we’ll go back to the Treasury, and ask for the millions and millions required.
“And they were going along, but then Matt Hancock arrived [as health and social care secretary] and it all changed [as Hancock set up NHSX]. Every IT programme seems to last about three years, but it takes a year to get the programme together, and a year to do the procurement, and at least two years to deploy: so we never see things given enough time to get the job done.”
Targets, money, action?
On the leadership front, the board noted that NHS IT programmes tend to coincide with NHS reorganisations; and NHS reorganisations inevitably end up with good, experienced people leaving the service.
Haywood-Alexander said there are signs that this is happening now, as acute trusts form acute groups or integrated service providers and clinical commissioning groups make way for ICSs, but neither put chief information officers on their boards.
“We all spend a lot of time dealing with the system, and if you’re doing it from a position in which you feel you’re not being valued, it’s very tough,” she said. Again, Kinnear agreed: “I used to work for a shared care record, and I got put into a commissioning support unit [when primary care trusts were abolished in order to set up CCGs].
“But lots of people just gave up and left the NHS at that point, and that contributed to CCGs having a very difficult birth. They just didn’t have the leaders and the experts that they needed to be successful. And now we’re seeing the same thing happening again.”
Entrepreneur Ravi Kumar said this was a real worry. “At the start of the Covid pandemic, there was real progress on IT, and we all hoped that it would be maintained,” he said. “Instead, there seems to be a gap at the top.
“Sajid Javid and Tim Ferris are saying some interesting things, but I wonder if they always agree with each other. Even if they do it will take time for the new relationships between the Department [of Health and Social Care] and NHS England the new transformation directorate to bed in.
“It’s important to have a consistent message, but it looks like we might not get one for twelve months. While that happens, more people will leave the frontline. That’s bad, because all the good things we saw being done during Covid was done by strong people with the drive to make it happen.”
Déjà vu all over again
Nettle drew some positive conclusions from the discussion. Yes, he said, “there is an element of déjà vu about these proposals” but the hope has to be that the NHS’ central bodies, local IT leaders and industry have learned from what has gone before.
If nothing else, he pointed out, in the 20 years since NPfIT was launched, there has been widespread buy-in to the idea that technology matters. “Both healthcare providers and industry have learned so much over two decades, and there is a genuine commitment to the idea that delivering healthcare is dependent on sharing good quality and timely data with those who need it to make operational and clinical decisions.”
However, Kumar summed up some of the board’s concerns about whether current politics and organisational changes could still derail the latest attempt to digitise the NHS. “The danger is we could end up in a situation where there is a target, and money, but there isn’t the strong leadership to make it happen,” he said.
Wayne Fowler – Sportsafe Service, Repair and Maintenance Engineer ESPO accreditation
Sportsafe have been working closely with ESPO for over 20 years, and the company’s uninterrupted delivery of gymnasium and fitness equipment maintenance services is set to continue as they retain their position on ESPO framework 107.
Framework 107, Inspection and Maintenance of Indoor Gymnasium, Fitness and Sport Equipment and Outdoor Schools Play and Sport Equipment, offers public sector authorities easy and quick access to quality suppliers who can successfully deliver the maintenance and inspection of indoor gymnasium, fitness and sport equipment, outdoor play and sport equipment, and minor repairs.
Sportsafe has a nationwide network of offices and engineer hubs ensuring our engineers are not more than 90 minutes away from our sites. The company employs over 25 Inspectors and Engineers all of them employed by Sportsafe and DBS checked for our customers site safety. Sportsafe hold CHAS, Constructionline Gold and Alcumus SafeContractor health and safety accreditations, and they are also a member of AFPE and ROSPA, giving their customers peace of mind that their equipment is in safe hands.
Claire Hunt, Sales & Marketing Director says, “Following 20 years of a close working relationship with ESPO, we are proud to continue delivering this service across the UK. This award adds to our year of celebration as we mark our 25th anniversary in 2022.”
Part of the Sportsafe submission referred to the new inspection and maintenance system that was deployed earlier this year, the benefits include:
Connection of all the teams within Sportsafe to provide continuity of service to our customers
Paper free which assists us with our ISO 14001 aims
Improves the speed between inspection and receipt of quotation for repairs, improving our customer equipment downtime
Asset tagging and product lifecycle statis enabling our customers to budget more accurately for new equipment
Management information for contract holders.
ESPO is a customer-focused, public sector owned professional buying organisation. Established in 1981, ESPO has the purchasing power to achieve savings to pass on to customers. ESPO is jointly owned by its six member authorities: Leicestershire County Council, Lincolnshire County Council, Cambridgeshire County Council, Norfolk County Council, Warwickshire County Council, and Peterborough City Council.
For more information on the ESPO frameworks please visit www.espo.org/
Integrated solution enables IT agility, productivity, and actionable intelligence for organisations of all sizes and industries, wherever they are on their modernisation and cloud migration journeys
SolarWinds (NYSE:SWI), a leading provider of simple, powerful, and secure IT management software, announces the launch of SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability, built on the SolarWinds Platform. The SolarWinds Platform offers organisations of any size the ability to accelerate their digital transformation efforts by providing a comprehensive and unified view of today’s modern, distributed, and hybrid network environments.
As organisations progress their digital transformation initiatives, they’re modernising their operations, applications, and databases, and leveraging hybrid and multi-cloud deployments—all while supporting existing, traditional workloads and systems. Organisations managing these complex, diverse, and distributed environments have amassed various monitoring and management tools across different teams. According to Gartner®, “for overlapping toolsets—many enterprises already have upward of 15 monitoring tools and do not wish to add further complexity.”1 As a result, ITOps, DevOps, and SecOps teams receive an overload of alerts and disjointed analytics and have difficulty accessing the actionable insights they need to quickly identify, prioritise, and resolve issues in business-critical services. These disparate tools can also be cumbersome to implement and manage, and they can become cost-prohibitive to maintain and scale, creating operational and business risks.
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability helps solve these problems through an integrated, comprehensive, and cost-effective full-stack solution designed to provide end-to-end oversight of service delivery and component dependencies, helping organisations shift from a reactive to proactive IT posture as they meet the challenges of today’s hybrid IT realities. With Hybrid Cloud Observability, tech pros gain single-pane-of-glass monitoring with actionable intelligence to expedite problem resolution and enable proactive management. SolarWinds applies built-in intelligence and AIOps to its full-stack solution. The platform is built to help organisations continuously improve performance, availability, security, and digital experience across complex, diverse, and distributed hybrid and cloud environments.
“The level of IT complexity organisations face is growing at an unprecedented scale due to tool sprawl, rising costs, security threats, and siloed operations,” said Rohini Kasturi, chief product officer, SolarWinds. “Customers have told us clearly, they need help to meet today’s challenges and reduce operational noise so their teams can scale to address a broad range of business needs faster, maximise budget outcomes, and drive business results.
“Building upon our more than 20 years of delivering monitoring and management solutions to market-leading organisations across different segments and verticals, SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability provides organisations with a single solution from one vendor, delivering a more streamlined approach to helping them advance their modernisation and cloud migration initiatives,” Kasturi continued.
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability enables organisations across all sizes and industries to gain rapid time to value, ensure service levels, accelerate issue resolution, and reduce alert fatigue and risk. It’s designed to help organisations do the following:
Accelerate issue resolution with actionable intelligence: The platform’s full-stack and integrated coverage helps IT teams make faster and more informed, coordinated, and effective decisions. Users can readily discover, map, and understand dependencies to predict and prevent user experience degradation and service outages.
Ensure service levels to increase IT efficiency and business agility: Hybrid Cloud Observability helps teams meet service levels and more efficiently conduct problem resolution, configuration, reporting, and planning tasks, freeing up time to focus on more impactful activities to advance the business. Armed with correlated intelligence, teams can more efficiently identify, prioritise, and resolve problems and anomalies, reduce compliance and attack surface risks, and accurately determine where best to scale performance and capacity.
Benefit from a low cost of ownership: Enterprises gain centralised oversight to optimise on-premises and cloud resource costs with a unified solution built to simplify and improve cloud migration efforts. The suite approach allows organisations to cost-effectively start and extend Hybrid Cloud Observability across hybrid and cloud environments with a unified experience, deployment, scalability, and support—offering a low total cost of ownership.
The SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability Essentials and Advanced tiers are now available, with additional offerings planned for later this year.
1Gartner, Innovation Insight for Observability, Padraig Byrne, Josh Chessman, September 28, 2020, refreshed on March 9, 2022.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Trueman Change are delighted to announce the launch of their new change methodology, derived from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic – The Trueman Change Way. This is a people-first approach, created from the lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic and implemented into change accelerator programmes to ensure transformation can continue to happen faster and more compassionately for cost-effective, sustainable outcomes.
Prior to the pandemic, change in large, complex public sector organisations was often slow, clunky and expensive. It was common for organisations to run over time and budget, damage morale, and not get the outcomes they needed. During covid, large scale change and transformation happened at pace, and Trueman Change have been conducting research, interviews and evaluations into how this happened.
This has resulted in the development of a new methodology and a change accelerator programme, designed to support organisations to kick start future change and transformation taking this recent learning and best practice, and embedding it at the heart of all future change.
To celebrate our new methodology we have designed and implemented a new Change Readiness Report Tool which helps change leaders to assess how ready for change they really are. It is a free 5-minute sense check on change in organisations, which then provides a full report scoring key areas which are known to be fundamental to good change management in a post covid world. When done well, change is empowering, exciting and impactful. Good change happens when organisations have the right components in place. Our free tool checks against these components:
1. Clarity, so everyone knows what needs to change and why
2. Putting people at the heart of change (not process)
3. Getting it done, with the right resources, culture and leadership
Within 5 minutes, public sector organisations answer 12 yes or no questions and the results are generated instantly, providing a sleek report with feedback to enhance their change readiness score. We offer a free 20-minute consultation to leaders who book a call with us to discuss options moving forward.
Our methodology – The Trueman Change Way – was created in response to managing change during the pandemic. In 2020, we wrote a white paper ‘Lessons Learned: Managing Change During the COVID-19 Crisis.’ This insightful paper captured the lessons learned during that period and highlighted six themes that were evident in all successful change programmes: Purpose, Clarity, Humanity, Collaboration, Action and Perseverance. Throughout the following year, Trueman Change ran a series of free online Change Chat events to understand this further. The Change Chat events discussed planning and delivering change throughout COVID. The expert speakers – public sector leaders from around country – and guests discussed in depth these six attributes and how they impacted positively on both organisations and communities.
That year of research was used to form the foundations of Trueman Change’s new methodology – The Trueman Change Way. Lucy Trueman, Managing Director, explains why she created this new approach to change:
“Change is constant, and now that we have experienced ‘what good change looks like’ we cannot afford to go back to old bureaucratic ways that affect morale and do not deliver. Our people-first methodology drives change faster and more compassionately for cost-effective, sustainable outcomes. It is humanistic and ensures a sense of purpose is established and communicated continuously, enabling change to happen effectively. It is important that we get this right as we care about the communities we support, and we want to see them thrive because of the difference we have been able to make.”
Andrew Grant, Interim Chief Executive for Castle Point Borough Council, an expert speaker on Trueman Changes’ Change Chat event in May 2021, concurred:
“Leadership that can successfully inspire, motivate and drive change meaningfully is largely dependent on good cultural alignment and clarity in communication. The Trueman Change Way methodology is about getting these attributes right first, as it not only focusses on what people need to know and do to enable change to happen, but it also encourages exploration into how people feel, and what they believe, to establish a shared sense of purpose.”
The Trueman Change Way methodology has been incorporated into a selection of Trueman Change’s smart solutions, including a new Change Accelerator Programme, and a free Change Readiness Report tool. Lucy Trueman’s first book on managing change post-COVID will be published soon. This book introduces the Trueman Change Wheel and its six ingredients for positive change.
50,000 paper files already scanned and made available electronically to clinicians
CCube Solutions announces today that Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has implemented its electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) to store legacy and day-forward paper medical records as part of a substantial investment to deliver digitally-enabled care.
The EDRMS project is part of a major digital transformation change programme within the Trust – to boost clinical and organisational efficiency – which will also see the procurement of a new organisational-wide EPR[1] system and the integration of the two new platforms together.
Fully operational and ‘live’ today, 7,500 clinical staff will be trained to the use the CCube EDRMS to ultimately access all of the Trust’s medical files – totalling around 650,000 patient records all of which are in the process of being scanned. This will help support the Trust’s busy workload of 32,000 outpatient appointments per month, delivered primarily from its large Blackpool Victoria Hospital site.
EDRMS provides instant access to medical records, enhances patient safety through 100% notes availability, improves clinical effectiveness, enhances security and auditing and saves money. It is also allowing storage areas to be converted into much needed clinical space.
Geoff Burrow, Blackpool Teaching Hospitals’ Chief Information Officer, explains, “Covid obviously delayed our progress with this project, but we’re now fully operational with EDRMS and focused on getting rid of the paper. Over 50,000 paper records have already been scanned in, each containing about 300 pages.”
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is situated on the west coast of Lancashire and operates within a regional health economy catchment area that spans Lancashire and South Cumbria, supporting a population of 1.6 million and an estimated 18 million visitors to the seaside town of Blackpool. The Trust also provides specialist tertiary care for cardiac and haematology services across this region, as well as hosting the National Artificial Eye Service.
Blackpool Victoria Hospital
The vast workload to scan all paper notes is being done in two ways. First, the Trust has invested in creating its own scanning department where 35 staff use 10 Opex Falcon scanners, supplied by CCube Solutions, to process the paperwork. Second, scanning has also been outsourced within the National Health Service to the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) – one of the largest specialist scanning operators in Europe – who use the same Opex Falcon equipment.
A not-for-profit arm’s length body of the Department of Health and Social Care, the NHSBSA has long track record in document scanning given its expertise and heritage processing all paper prescriptions in the UK which still total tens of millions per month.
The Opex Falcon scanners are rated at 116 pages per minute at 300 dpi – the resolution recommended to meet BS 10008, a best practice records standard for the implementation and operation of electronic information management systems, including the storage, extraction and transfer of information.
Burrow says, “CCube EDRMS is designed to literally be an online version of the paper record and has six sections busy clinicians are familiar with. This makes it easy and intuitive for them to find the documents they need whether it be clinical correspondence, clinical notes, treatment documents, investigation reports, safeguarding documents and so on.”
Given the transition underway between paper and electronic notes, when clinicians log into the Trust’s Patient Administration System (PAS) today, they are currently presented with a marker to show whether the patient’s record is available digitally or still in paper format.
Burrow adds, “We’re currently working on the detail but the strategy will be to adopt scan-on-demand so that when a patient is booked for an appointment, their notes are pulled from the library, digitised ahead of time and then made available in the CCube EDRMS. This then saves moving any paper files about.”
The shift from paper to digital health records will deliver a variety of other benefits:
100% notes availability. Electronic health records are available at the touch of a button to the right person at any time. This avoids delays in patients receiving treatment – or even appointments cancelled – if their paperwork isn’t readily available.
Remote and multi-user access. Remote and multi-user access to health records is now delivered 24/7. This is key given the ‘new normal’ of remote working post pandemic and the requirement for multi-disciplinary teams to collaborate together – and view medical notes at the same time – to provide care to an individual.
‘In context’ access to medical records to be offered. As the Trust is currently procuring a new organisational-wide EPR, once this is finalised and the software deployed, a link will be added so that clinicians opening a patient’s record in the EPR can see – in context – the legacy digitised health record held in the EDRMS, too. This links the two systems together.
Security and data integrity is enhanced. Scanning records vastly improves the security of confidential patient information as files once digitised cannot degrade, be lost or be misplaced. Data is also backed up, access to the system logged and audited, and information lifecycle management rules applied to the data.
The CCube EDRMS runs on Dell EMC server and storage systems in the Trust’s two on-premise datacentres, dual-linked for resilience to ensure system availability and uptime.
Vijay Magon, CCube Solutions’ managing director, says, “Our research shows that on average a paper record is handled 10 to 15 times from storage to delivery. Not only is there an infection risk as people touch the paper but the costs just keep mounting each time files are requested and then put away. It is super to support Blackpool Teaching Hospitals address this: an invest to save process to get rid of the paper once and for all which will massively increase efficiency, improve staff productivity and enhance the overall care provided to patients locally.”
By Victoria Preece, Compliance Director – allpay Limited
“Competition law compliance is not always given the attention that it deserves. I would like to see anti-competitive behaviour taken as seriously by UK businesses and boards as the risks around bribery, fraud, health and safety and cybercrime.” Lord David Currie, Chairman, Competition and Markets Authority (Competition Law Risk: Short Guide V 2.0)
‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing’ and ‘Prevention is better than cure’. We have all said these well-known phrases in our lives but if we knew what to do to prevent the need for hindsight surely, we would always do it?
As a Compliance professional I will always look for the risks and advise that you do all that you can to reduce or mitigate them. Sometimes you must accept them, but at least you have paid attention to them and taken them seriously. If we’d followed Lord Currie’s advice, and in hindsight, we would have paid as much attention to the risks associated with competition law as we do every day in diligently monitoring and managing our fraud or security risks.
Our own experience began in 2017 when, after raising an incident of concern to the Regulators, we found ourselves ensnared in the investigation into ‘Cartel behaviour’ that followed.
Ironically, if we hadn’t made the initial steps to raise the flag, it is likely that the behaviour of several attendees of the Industry Network Meeting involved would never have come to light, left undiscovered and the subsequent fines unlevied; but not reporting was never a thought.
Under competition law, ‘just being in the room’ can effectively lead to an individual or business being guilty, by association. Having our reputation tarnished alongside others within the Network that we had innocently joined is something allpay will have to deal with.
However, as ‘the informant’ or ‘the complainant,’ the terms that the Regulators prefer, we had an overwhelming feeling that there was no sense of proportionality to the way each company was dealt with. We were very unprepared for the five years of investigation that followed and although we had raised concerns about a clear act of anti-competitive behaviour, we had not considered that the industry meetings that we had attended with naivety were linked to the separate and clearly anti- competitive act we had reported.
Similarly in December 2016, a representative of Balmoral Tanks famously attended one meeting of what turned out to be a cartel, a cartel they refused to join. It ended in the same result, the regulator acting against all parties, including Balmoral Tanks despite them refusing to join the cartel.
Although Balmoral Tanks knew that they were reporting cartel behaviour and we did not, we have had to accept a fine whilst strongly denying ever knowingly joining or agreeing to participate in a cartel. We now know that we were ignoring the request of the cartel not to compete but did not appreciate that we were effectively in that cartel.
However, another well-known phrase is ‘ignorance of the law is no defence’ and looking back we could have known, indeed should have known that stepping outside our organisation into an environment with other competitors is fraught with competition law risk. We needed more training across the whole business, to mitigate that risk. On reflection a small investment to make versus the fines imposed by the Regulators.
In hindsight we accept that the Regulator has a job to do, they seek to identify where the law has been broken and bring those criminals to justice. And that is exactly how it feels, you are a criminal, even if you were not in the room, or even as a director unaware of those Network Meetings being attended by others in the business, you still bear the blame attached to the reputational damage that comes from the media reporting of the whole sorry affair.
Employees at allpay have been left feeling disappointed in themselves, in us as a business, let down through uninformed behaviour. Although not a member of the allpay Board when this started for us, I feel the outcome and damage to our good name weigh heavy on my mind as I have a duty to protect the staff, the business and importantly the vulnerable customers we provide services to support.
The Payment Services Regulator (PSR) have been in dialogue with us post investigation as we reached out to them to try to understand what else can be done to protect other businesses from suffering their investigation process, and suffering it is! It drains you of time, energy, resources and ultimately undermines hard fought reputation after being portrayed as ‘guilty’ among those attention-grabbing media headlines.
In his response Chris Helmsley, the Managing Director of the PSR, has reminded us that the Regulators are there to protect end users, customers, by ensuring anti-competitive behaviour is ended. Does that imply that we, allpay, having been found guilty (unwittingly) of cartel behaviour, do not have our customer protection at the heart of our business?
As the Compliance Director, one of the many hats I wear is that of MLRO (Money Laundering Reporting Officer) and alongside the rest of the Board, I work hard to ensure that the often very vulnerable customers we work with are protected, even when it has not been mandated for us as a E- money Institution.
APP or Authorised Push Payment Fraud is a very real threat facing anyone who uses a payment account to transfer funds, and our customers use faster payments system to pay their care bills every day. Last year we took the strategic decision to invest in a Confirmation of Payee service for our Prepaid Card accountholders. We developed our own software solution and paid a significant fee to enrol with PAY UK to complete the implementation (due by May 2022). We did this to add an extra layer of protection for our customers, not to meet a regulatory requirement, and not an improvement we will charge customers extra for, it just felt like the right thing to do to give our customers the best protection we can.
We make decisions in the interests of our customers every day, so to be found guilty of breaking Competition Law for having reported anti-competitive behaviour within our industry has been doubly painful.
Would we raise concern again? Absolutely, without hesitation, but we are better equipped to understand the painful process that the PSR take you through, with no support or direction. We agreed to an expedited process, again in hindsight not understanding what that meant in terms of being able to manage the process to help ourselves better. We believed we were helping the Regulator save time and money and get to an earlier decision. In fact, we had agreed to have our potential guilt and then our actual guilt publicly reported on twice.
And so, why share this tale of woe with a wider audience? It’s behind us and we are moving on stronger and wiser. However, if nothing good comes from our experience then an opportunity has been missed. Every business owner, Board Director, Executive and Senior Manager may already
know that if they don’t not pay enough attention to competition law then they risk a long and reputationally damaging journey. But can you ask yourselves the following questions and confidently say yes to them?
Do we know what are our present competition law compliance risks?
Which activities in our business model are likely to create situations where competition law becomes an issue?
Do we have a healthy culture in our organisation in respect of CMA risk?
If you do nothing more, review your training and make sure your people have completed it. How do you know that the meeting or conference you are going to next week isn’t leading to an investigation by the Regulators? That may feel a little dramatic but that is the reality that we have been through…… and we can all do with a little less drama in our lives!
“I was just going to a meeting to shake a few hands. It was almost a social occasion where you just said hello to your rivals in the industry. I didn’t give it any real thought… Staggering stupidity with the benefit of hindsight.” From Does Prison Work for Cartelists? – The view from behind bars.
An interview of Bryan Allison by Michael O’Kane (The Antitrust Bulletin: Vol 56, No. 2, summer 2011)
Local authorities that own or operate electricity generation like solar, wind, gas and combined heat and power (CHP) have got just four weeks left to apply for funding to help them update their generation equipment. The deadline for applications is Tuesday 10 May 2022.
The funding is part of the Accelerated Loss of Mains Change Programme (ALoMCP), a scheme operated by National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) and the GB Distribution Network Operators. The funding can help generation owners, like local authorities, become compliant with new mandatory Distribution Code regulations – the regulations that generator owners must abide by to connect to the electricity network. Once the funding ends, generator owners will still need to meet the compliance requirements but will have to pay for the updates themselves.
The new regulations come into effect on 1 September 2022, by which point, all electricity generation within the scope of the programme must be compliant, or face Ofgem approved enforcement action. In Scotland alone, local authorities owned 16% of operational locally owned energy generation. Many of these authorities will own generators that are within the scope of the programme, which includes generation that:
• Was installed before February 2018 (or in some cases, July 2018).
• Is between 11kW and 50MW in capacity.[1]
• Is connected via the G59 engineering requirement of the Distribution Code.
The equipment updates concern the inverters, converters or G59 relays that are responsible for the Loss of Mains protection settings on the generator. They are an instrumental part of all generation equipment and help protect both the generator and the network from potential faults. In updating the protection settings, the generation becomes more reliable and therefore embeds the electricity network with more strength and resilience.
Cheng Chen, the senior manager for the ALoMCP at National Grid ESO, says: “Compliance with Loss of Mains requirements is not optional and so electricity generator owners should take advantage of the funding that is available now to help them make the upgrades.”
Non-compliant generation poses a risk to the electricity network and those not compliant from 1 September 2022 could be subject to an enforcement process that could result in the de-energisation of the whole site.
As a result of widespread Loss of Mains compliance, Great Britain’s electricity network will be better able to bring more renewable electricity generators online, as a more resilient network can support additional low carbon generation.
Mr Chen added: “This is a relatively small change for most generator owners to make, but if we can achieve widespread compliance the combined impact will have a huge benefit to our electricity network. By becoming compliant, generator owners will be futureproofing their power and helping to deliver a strong, resilient, and low carbon electricity network to protect our power for future generations.”
A new scheme that local authorities can invest their Local Authority Delivery Scheme (LADs) and Home Upgrade Grant Scheme (HUGs) budgets in has received backing from British Gas and So Energy.
Neil Marshall – director of external affairs – Effective Energy Group
Developed by Nottinghamshire-based, Effective Energy Group, Help4Homes goes further than some Government-led schemes that focus solely on energy reduction, and provides energy saving advice, free heating, insulation and white goods, and an income maximisation service for low-income and vulnerable households struggling to pay their energy bills.
EG’s Help4Homes scheme has already helped 1,500 homes in England and Wales
Since going live at the end of 2021 with an initial £500k of funding, the response to Help4Homes has been overwhelmingly positive and it has already provided support for 1,500 households in England and Wales, delivering everything from energy reduction measures through to significant increases in household incomes – in some case up to £3,000 a year.
Neil Marshall, director of external affairs at Effective Energy Group, said: “Help4Homes is the ideal vehicle for local authorities looking to put their LADs, HUGs and local budgets to use in a manner that will make a huge difference to households that need it the most.”
Simon Oscroft, Co-Founder at So Energy added: “Help4Homes will only grow in its importance this year, particularly now that the energy price rise has hit home and bills have increased for millions of households. At So Energy we have always looked to do right by our customers, going above and beyond to help those most in need, so we’re delighted to support Help4Homes during this time.”
Can government and public sector organisations do more to protect national water supplies?
Smarti Environmental, the UK’s leading waterless urinal provider, is urging government and public sector organisations to play their part in the battle against needless water wastage following World Water Day and the Environment Secretary Minister Rebecca Pow’s call for the greater adoption of water efficient products.
Last year, as part of the Government’s drive to protect national water supplies, seven new areas were designated as being under serious water stress. These include Severn Trent Water, South Staffordshire Water, Wessex Water, Portsmouth Water, Cambridge Water, the Bournemouth area of South West Water, and the Isles of Scilly. Each are due to publish water resources management plans (WRMP) in 2022, that consider all options to manage demand more effectively – including metering and greater leakage reduction.
Smarti Environmental, which enables existing flushing urinals to go waterless in just a day, is encouraging government and public sector organisations to urgently review their use of flushing urinals in the battle against the UK’s growing water crisis. Its research shows that there are currently around 3.5 million water-supplied urinals in the UK, which collectively waste 217 billion litres of water each year, equivalent to 87 thousand Olympic-sized swimming pools.
To encourage the move to flushless urinals, Smarti Environmental is offering large organisations with 100 or more urinals within their group, a free washroom trial for 3-months, including free installation of its retro-fit waterless valves. Smaller businesses can also benefit from savings of more than 50% compared to the cost of running conventional flushing urinals.
As part of its installation service, Smarti Environmental is also offering to replace blocked or partially blocked pipework – the result of the chemical reaction between urine and water in flushing urinals. Each year, blocked or partially blocked urinal pipes account for thousands of floods in gents across the UK, resulting in expensive plumbing and clean up bills.
Kimberley Hill, Sales Manager at Smarti Environmental, commented: “Businesses have a key part to play in reducing needless water waste, and one of the simplest and most cost-effective steps is to switch to waterless urinals. This not only saves 100,000 litres of water per urinal, per year, but it also cuts related costs by more than half, and CO2 by 105kg per urinal. To put that into perspective, if all urinals in the UK went waterless, that would be the equivalent of removing 100,000 diesel cars from the road.”
Kimberly Hill added: “As an accredited Carbon Neutral Business, we’re doing all we can to make a positive difference to the environment, and that includes the use of environment-friendly enzyme technology. This ends the need for harsh cleaning materials, and avoids pollutants from entering the waste-water system, further enhancing the environmental benefits of waterless urinals. For organisations looking to a net zero future, we provide part of the solution to achieving this.”
Commenting on the seven water company areas identified as being under serious water stress, Environment Agency Chair, Emma Howard Boyd, said: “Fresh water is the world’s most precious commodity and everyone needs to wake up to the fact that there is less of it to go around. If we continue to operate as usual, by 2050 the amount of water available in England could be reduced by 10 to 15 percent, some rivers could have between 50 and 80 percent less water during the summer, and we will not be able to meet the demands of people, industry and agriculture.”
Smarti Environmental’s waterless urinals are used both by private and public sector organisations including the NHS. Its retro-fit, waterless one-way multi-valve technology traps and prevent all odours from drains, breaks down all biofilms and uric salts in pipework to prevent blocked pipes, and stops the spread of viruses through the absence of airborne aerosol germs created by flushing urinals. Made from fully recyclable materials, they fit 98% of standard urinals with no need to change urinal bowls, and reduce the annual running cost of a typical three bay urinal by between £630 and £1,230 a year.
Used in conjunction with Smarti’s eco-friendly, odour-eating and bacteria/virus busting SteriKleen surface spray, urinal cleaning is reduced to once every 24 hours, consisting of a wipe, spray and walk away process that leaves urinals clean and fresh. This makes switching to waterless urinals simple and easy, enabling businesses to Build Back Better and Greener.
Manx Care, Isle of Man were looking for solutions to replace an outdated legacy paging system that resulted in failed and delayed messaging impacting emergency response, with a modern progressive method of communication.
To address this challenge, Manx Care embarked on a project with Alcidion to deploy Smartpage Clinical, with a view to introduce Smartpage Non-Clinical and Smartpage Response in later project phases.
Manx Care innovating health and care services
Manx Care is the Isle of Man organisation tasked with delivering health and care services to the Island’s population. The start of a new era in public services on the island was marked on April 1, 2021. It involved the restructuring of the largest department in the IOM Government. This consisted of the separation of Department of Health and Social Care functions and the creation of a bespoke operational body.
The first organisation of its kind in the IOM, Manx Care is an entirely new statutory body, designed to operate at arms’ length from the Department of Health and Social Care and focusing on the delivery of services to the public. The organisation is led by an executive leadership team, employing around 2,500 health and care staff and covering a geographic area of 221 square miles with a population of over 84,000.
The two hospitals that Manx Care supports includes Noble’s Hospital, with 314 acute care beds (20 ward areas), and Ramsey Cottage Hospital with 48 beds (2 ward areas), each managing annual admissions/discharges of 20,038 and annual ED attendances of over 31,000.
Overcoming the challenge
The acute care group of Manx Care needed a reliable two-way messaging solution that would facilitate quick, auditable, accurate, accessible, patient-specific messaging to improve both communication and clinical work-streams and to benefit patient care. The solution was required for both emergency and non-emergency clinical scenarios across the hospitals.
Working alongside Manx Care’s chief clinical information officer Dr Gregor Peden, chief nursing information officer Rebecca Erani and supported by the Government Technology Services Team, Alcidion’s Smartpage Clinical was selected to be deployed across the acute care services.
Improving clinical support and patient care
Alcidion’s Smartpage Clinical provided Manx Care with a secure app for clinical staff to send and receive messages more efficiently and in a more structured, patient centred format without taking them away from delivering patient care.
Smartpage Clinical ensures confidentiality is maintained and gives clinicians the ability for instant two-way messaging, enabling rapid clinical decision making and effective patient care support. The solution also allows staff to create and share tasks according to their availability and workload, a key priority for the Manx Care digital team.
Smartpage Response contains an emergency paging system allowing the emergency group alerting to be sent out via an emergency ‘dashboard’ by switchboard and received by clinicians via the same Smartpage app. The Smartpage solution provides a more interactive, two-way, visible method of emergency paging which enables team communication and support for efficient working between both clinical staff, switchboard and emergency teams at Manx Care.
Delivering a flexible and supportive approach
The Smartpage Clinical and Smartpage Response capabilities have been extremely well received across Manx Care due to the simplicity, reliability and functionality of the system. Alcidion’s Smartpage implementation team offered a flexible and supportive approach and based on feedback during User Acceptance Testing and clinical practice, evolved the system to meet Manx Care’s needs.
Commenting on the benefits Dr Gregor Peden, chief clinical information officer, Manx Care, said: “Smartpage has provided Noble’s Hospital with a modern and intuitive messaging tool that helps to improve care and drive task efficiency by providing clinically rich information at the point of care. Working innovatively with Alcidion to deliver a product that met the needs of front-line staff meant that our roll out and user adoption was relatively effortless.”
Rebecca Erani, chief nursing information officer, Manx Care, also commented: “Through simple, person-centred technology, Smartpage has supported effective, concise communication delivered to the right person at the right time. This in turn has enabled more time focused on patient care and less time chasing information or clinician input, which is something as a collective workforce we are all striving towards.”
Other positive feedback from users of the system include that fact that clinical staff no longer have to waste time bleeping staff members and second guessing if they have received the bleep. Plus there is no longer a need to move away from assessing patients to go to a phone as now it is possible to see from a glance of the Smartpage phone who and why someone is messaging so that staff can prioritise accordingly.
The new system has been reported as being much quicker to use and has vastly improved the content and structure of patient information, for example the use of SBAR, especially in relation to the referral or escalation of acuity. It is now possible for staff to see which other emergency team members are responding to an emergency which helps with planning and organising workload if multiple emergency pages are received.
Looking ahead to the future
Due to the successful implementation of Smartpage Clinical in secondary care, Manx Care are reviewing options to begin onboarding Smartpage to general practitioners and district nurse teams as an effective communication tool to refer patients and request support where needed.
Secondary care is also expanding to incorporate Smartpage Non-Clinical for porters and housekeepers and integrate it directly with Alcidion’s Patientrack to enable automatic alerting based on National Early Warning Score (NEWS2).
Manx Care have seen an improvement in the acute referral process from the emergency department to inpatient care, in terms of referral acceptance and time to specialty review.
Nursing staff feel more confident and empowered to escalate patient care using Smartpage. With Patientrack to be integrated shortly, they will also be able to track escalation response.
The pace of digital transformation across the public sector has accelerated significantly in recent years, and with Covid-19 prompting a near-overnight shift to online services, the process has come a long way already. Services once requiring pages of paperwork now are fully digitised—renewing your passport or driver’s license can both be completed entirely online, for example.
But, as part of a wider strategy to build a modern, connected society, there remains work to be done to deliver effective digital services to meet the needs and expectations of users. For instance, if digital public sector services are to be successful, improve outcomes, and make better use of available budgets, there needs to be a significant emphasis on boosting the quality of the user experience.
As government minister Steve Barclay said last year, “Now more than ever, it is important that government responds to people’s heightened expectations about the services they use. During the pandemic, people have had to interact with public services in a variety of new ways, including the NHS app and the vaccine booking service. People rightly expect government to be data-driven and digitally literate, and this will be a priority for me in my new role.”
Where Are We Heading?
There are interesting examples of how the overall strategy is developing. Late last year, for instance, the Government Digital Service published an update for its proposed “One Login” system, described as a “mission to build a simple, joined-up, and personalised experience of government for everyone.” The idea is to provide a single sign-on and identity-checking system to replace the patchwork of login processes and credentials currently seen across different government services.
This is a major technology project. With a budget reportedly in the region of £400 million, it will be built in the cloud and run on Amazon Web Services, and will include the development of an app designed to streamline online processes and provide a better user experience.
Identity authentication is key to delivering secure services resilient to fraud, providing users with the confidence they need to use them on a regular basis. The general public has become used to authenticating themselves online across a huge range of consumer services. Consolidating access to government logins will help deliver a more connected approach, improve accessibility, and should result in a more effective experience all around.
It also offers the potential to integrate trusted third-party applications and services, like those provided by banking, insurance, and healthcare organisations, among others. In doing so, there is scope to improve efficiency and reduce the costly administrative overheads associated with existing manual processes.
Risks and Rewards
The size of the budget allocated to this strategy gives some context to the range of challenges it’s likely to face during its development and implementation. For starters, this is a complex undertaking, and given the difficulties faced by major public sector IT projects over the years, delivering a solution on time and within budget will represent a major achievement.
The conclusions of a report called, “The challenges in implemented digital change,” published by the National Audit Office last year, remind us these large-scale projects are extremely challenging. Its authors said, “despite 25 years of government strategies and countless attempts to deliver digital business change successfully, our reports show a consistent pattern of underperformance. This underperformance can often be the result of programmes not being sufficiently thought through before key decisions on technology solutions are made.”
As the report points out, this can cause major problems and remains a source of concern for a project as large and complex as One Login. “This means that there is a gap between what government intends to achieve and what it delivers to citizens and service users, which wastes taxpayers’ money and delays improvements in public services,” the report says. “If government is to improve its track record in delivering digital business change, it must learn the hard-won lessons of experience and equip its leaders to act effectively.”
As a result, there is certain to be intense scrutiny and, in some quarters, hostility to the development of this wide-ranging service. Whether the concerns centre around past performance, issues such as security and privacy, or come from people who oppose the idea of further government involvement in a digital society, the pressure will quickly build if there’s overspend or undue delay.
On the other hand, gaining public support and confidence by simplifying access to online public services with an effective solution delivery will be a major step in modernising the way government interacts with its citizens. For our increasingly digital-native population, this won’t be about innovation—it will represent a minimum requirement for people who spend more time than ever online.
Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum named cyber security failures as one of the biggest threats facing international governments and business, and the UK is no exception. The UK’s public sector is currently facing a rise in the number of cyber security incidents. The Ministry of Justice revealed that it faced a series of data breaches and ransomware attacks over the course of the 2020-21 financial year, and it will likely face many more in the near future.
How to protect yourself
To help business and government organisations keep themselves safe from the most common cyber-attacks, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) launched the Cyber Essentials certification scheme in 2014. This year, to help increase security across both the public and private sector, the NCSC has updated some of the scheme’s key requirements, which came into effect on the 24th January 2022.
Meeting these new requirements is necessary to pass the Cyber Essentials assessment, which is mandatory for certain Government departments and advised for most other sectors. Although these changes are positive and much needed as cyber threats become ever more sophisticated, they will require extra effort for public sector departments, and accredited third party suppliers, to comply. Companies will be given six months to complete the certifications and ensure their systems are secure, with 12 months’ grace on some requirements.
The certification’s cost
One of the main changes to Cyber Essentials is the new tiered pricing system. Up until this year, the assessment cost the same for companies or organisations of all sizes – just £300. Now, though, the prices vary depending on the amount of employees. After all, the bigger an organisation, the more changes need to be made, and assessments will take longer for them.
Talking about the change, Anne W, the NCSC’s Head of Commercial Assurance Services, said, “While Cyber Essentials is designed to help any organisation attain a minimum level of cyber security, the assessment process can be quite complex. We want to continue to ensure this important scheme remains accessible to every business, no matter their size.” Micro organisations, or those with nine or less employees, will still pay £300. Small organisations, with 10-49 employees, will have to pay £400. Medium-sized organisations, or those with 50-249 employees, pay £450. Finally, organisations with over 250 employees will now have to pay £500 for the assessment.
Changes for remote workers
Many of the updated requirements concern those working from home, reflecting the changes in the workplace landscape over the past couple of years. According to the scheme’s requirements, anyone working from home for any period of time is classed as a ‘home worker.’ Home workers’ devices, such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones, will now fall under the scope of Cyber Essentials, and will need to be secure enough to pass the certification assessment. In fact, all devices used to access your data or services will be in scope, too. However, home workers’ routers won’t be in scope, so any firewalls must be present on their devices rather than the router. The one exception to this is if the business or organisation has provided the router – in this case, it will be in scope too..
Changes for cloud services
All cloud services are now fully integrated into the Cyber Essentials scheme, meaning that your organisation will be held responsible for making sure that controls are implemented to protect any data that’s being hosted on the cloud. Users will need to check the cloud services that they’re using and ensure that they meet the standards of the Cyber Essentials standards.
Multi-factor authentication, or MFA, must also be used by any accounts that can access the cloud services. MFA makes accounts more secure, as rather than just entering a password, the user has to provide more than one method of verification. Four methods are accepted by the updated requirements, including: a known or trusted account, a physically separate token, a managed enterprise device, and an app on a trusted device.
Other changes to note
There are also a number of smaller updates that need to be implemented. From now on, if they want to pass the assessment, departments will no longer be allowed to pick and choose which software updates they use. All high and critical updates or patches, to both software and devices, will need to be installed within 14 days, and automatic updates should also be enabled. All servers, which includes virtual servers, will now fall under the scope of Cyber Essentials, as will thin clients (or ‘dumb terminals’ capable of accessing a remote desktop). Separate accounts must also be used whenever accessing an administrative account.
While it might seem like a lot of work, all of these new requirements are necessary for those looking to pass the Cyber Essentials assessment and obtain the new certification. Only then will you be able to prove to other departments, organisations, and even companies that your information is secure, and that you’re protected against all of today’s most common online threats.
New police officers, with Councillor Jas Athwal, Leader, London Borough of Redbridge (Photo: Andrew Baker)
An East London borough has adopted a pioneering, community-based approach to prevent and manage crime. In a move which could be replicated across the country, the London Borough of Redbridge is the first local authority to give residents a real say in shaping services, policies and budgets aimed at improving community safety.
Following the biggest public consultation in its history, Redbridge Council last year identified the issues that most concern residents and established an independent Community Crime Commission of 16 local people with personal experience of the issues, to advise on ways to tackle them.
The initiative was welcomed by local residents as a means of giving them a voice on issues which can blight daily life in the borough. Commissioner Taiwo Ademola commented at the launch of the Commission: “This is an amazing opportunity to make real, tangible change, here in my local community.”
Public engagement was further deepened with the setting up of a 60-strong panel of local residents, the Community Voice, designed to be representative of Redbridge as a whole. Panel members were invited to comment on the key issues as the evidence-gathering process gained momentum.
The Commissioners’ investigations uncovered a series of systemic factors undermining efforts to create a safer community including agencies not working effectively together, artificial thresholds for support that mean young people don’t get help early enough to protect them from criminality, and low levels of confidence amongst residents that things can improve.
The Commissioners’ findings have now been published in a wide-ranging report which makes 48 recommendations on anti-social behaviour, burglary, domestic abuse, violence against women and girls, and drugs and street violence. As well as specific actions targeting each area, the Commission is calling for a new, system-wide approach based on a shared long-term vision. They want to see a multi-agency commitment to change, meaningful public accountability for progress and a significant improvement in the quality and consistency of communication between service providers and with residents.
The report emphasises the need to use existing resources more effectively, co-locating service providers and working closely with local people to design the services they need, making them easier to access and more responsive to residents’ needs.
Redbridge Enforcement Hub (Photo: Justin Thomas)
Along with its partners, including the Metropolitan Police, the Council has already responded to the report. In addition to restructuring and reprofiling resources to meet the recommendations, a budget of £1.2 million has so far been committed for 2022, with additional investment expected as initiatives are developed.
Several of the Commission’s recommendations focus on better neighbourhood policing, joined-up services, and working more closely with local communities to win back public confidence. As a result the Council is expanding its ‘enforcement hubs’. These fixed and mobile walk-in centres have been established in two areas in advance of roll out across the whole borough. They provide a dedicated space where people can get help and advice directly from the police and enforcement officers.
The Chair of the Community Crime Commission, Dr Javed Khan OBE, said: ‘Agencies must work more closely together, rapidly sharing information, and must be much better connected to the communities they support. Otherwise, people fall through the cracks. The enforcement hubs are a good example of this approach, as they bring services together and they take those services to where people are within the community, making it easier for residents to access them.’
Other recommendations from the Commission, on which the Council and its partners are already working, include:
The deployment of 25 new police officers as part of the Town Centre Safety Team
Support for young people before they fall into criminality, with activity in secondary schools to prevent gang membership and anti-social behaviour
The establishment of a new youth hub and mentoring schemes for young people
A change to police policy to ensure every victim of a burglary is offered a police visit
Additional operational staff for the 24/7 CCTV centre
Seamless support for victims of domestic abuse with the provision of a new ‘single front door’ and a single phone number
Workshops for young people on safety
Dr Khan said: ‘Fresh, practical ideas for solving difficult problems come from the people who live with those problems every day. This process, of genuine community involvement in tackling crime, has been ground-breaking. We are pleased to see that the Council is already acting on our recommendations.’
The Leader of Redbridge Council, Jas Athwal, said: ‘This process represents a step-change in how local people can engage with public services. Their experiences of what we do and their ideas on how we can better work together will help to create a safer borough. We are now focusing on the issues we know concern them, including women’s safety, and access to the police and other services.’
No child is to be left behind says edtech charity LGfL
As the Omicron variant surges and schools nationwide prepare for further disruption, potential closures, and a possible return to remote teaching and learning in 2022, edtech charity LGfL-The National Grid for Learning is once again stepping up support by offering thousands of Chromebooks, procured as part of its successful #BridgeTheDivide initiative, below-cost, to help schools ensure no child is left behind during this terrible pandemic. For what is believed to be a first for the UK education market, Chromebooks will be available from just £99.99. “How have we done this?,” said John Jackson, CEO, LGfL. “We’ve been using funds raised from other initiatives and ploughed them back into education.”
“You might think that below-cost devices would be as far as one charity could go, but we have once again gone one step further by providing buy-now pay-later options,” said John. “Schools purchasing devices can now choose to be invoiced in April 2022. Our thinking is this would help those in areas of deprivation to achieve the learner-to-device ratios they require, without the financial constraints of an upfront bill.”
By increasing learner-to-device ratios, these Chromebooks offer significant benefits not just in relation to the continued learning through remote methods, but also for everyday opportunities to teach and learn in different and more effective ways. They build students’ digital literacy skills and independent learning and enable schools to adopt a hybrid approach to teaching and learning, as schools like Whitefield Primary School in Liverpool found.
“As the Headteacher, the impact of working with LGfL over the last two years has been very significant,” said Jill Wright, Whitefield Primary School. “We felt safe in the knowledge that we were getting best value and used the #BridgeTheDivide scheme to secure Chromebooks for all our children in years four, five and six. It also meant that we had access to a wide variety of online tools too, which had a very positive impact on the teaching and learning in school.
“When children were forced to work remotely we were also able to provide extra devices to families with multiple children, provide access to teaching and learning, prevent the children from feeling isolated, help them avoid discord with their siblings and support their parents. We could see who was logging on, ensure that they were safe, chat to them online, send their work back to them and maintain a good relationship with the children and their families.”
LGfL’s initiative is not just about providing the lowest cost devices for schools and students, but providing a holistic approach to tackling the digital inequalities exacerbated by this ongoing pandemic. Through its partnership with Google, LGfL has been able to provide free on-demand live support to give educators the opportunity to acquire the skills required to harness the full capabilities and effectiveness of cloud-based teaching and learning via Chromebooks.
Through its #BridgeTheDivide initiative LGfL has already delivered over 200,000 new and recycled devices to schools, at a fraction of the cost of the government’s scheme, saving schools an estimated £7M to date. Most importantly, it has enabled children to learn and progress in spite of the pandemic.
“There are 4.3 million children living in poverty in the UK – we simply cannot sit and watch the 18 month attainment gap between the haves and have nots widen further,” said John, who is urging Local Authorities in areas of high deprivation to fund laptops for children who do not have access to remote teaching and learning at home.
“It’s time that we all stand together to help schools during this continuing crisis and the devastation and growing social divide that it creates, to build brighter futures for ‘all’ our young people,” said John Jackson.
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