Student Revision Tips From Accelerate Learning
Student Revision Tips From Accelerate Learning was first seen on Accelerate Learning Centres. Whether you’re studying for GCSE’s, A-Levels or taking an entrance exam for
Category: Health & Performance
How Private Tuition Can Give Your Child the Confidence to Exceed Expectations
How Private Tuition Can Give Your Child the Confidence to Exceed Expectations was first seen on Accelerate Learning Centres. Every parent wants to do the
How to Prepare for 11+ Entrance Exams in Liverpool
How to Prepare for 11+ Entrance Exams in Liverpool was first seen on Accelerate Learning Centres. Education is one of the most important aspects of
The Real #1 Meeting Platform for Security & Reliability in Healthcare
Is your Video platform as secure as you think?
Information Security and protection of data is a topic which has been in the forefront of most Chief Technical Officers and IT Directors minds for some time. However, with greater visibility and action from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) the threat of enforcement, prosecution and fines is ever-increasing and the need to be vigilant about all types of data security exists.
Do I really need data security?
Whilst the likes of British Airways who face a proposed fine of £183 million, Facebook Ireland who were fined £500,000 and Heathrow Airport who were fined £120,00 all for personal data protection breaches may feel like a world apart from public sector, there are further examples of public sector organisations falling foul of regulations too. During the last 12 months, BUPA, the CPS and the IICSA have all been fined for failing to effectively protect data. Also, within the last 12 months the ICO has successfully prosecuted several individuals from within the Healthcare sector for unlawfully accessing records or failing to keep data safe.
How secure is your video call?
When you join a video call to discuss a patient case or refer information, you take for granted that the only people listening to you and accessing your case notes or information are your colleagues on the other end of the call. But are you certain? Does your supplier provide everything you need to gain the level of trust you need?
So, what do you need to look for in your supplier?
It’s key that your supplier meets industry standards for data protection across their platform and the top of the list should be ISO 27001. This standard is internationally recognised and provides assurance that your supplier has full control over the security and access of their platform. But, did you know there are other key standards that should be applied to a platform and the supplier running it?
Cyber Essentials plus is a standard provided by the National Cyber Security Centre in the UK. The standard is monitored by an accredited body and ensures the platform meets a set of criteria to remove risks of attacks.
NHS Data and Security Toolkit provides the National Health Service with absolute confidence that your supplier is handling their data with the highest level of security
Ideally, your data would never leave your own network, it doesn’t then need to enter the wide world of the Internet. Your supplier needs to be able to deliver calls within the HSCN (Health and Social Care Network) network. This ensures any healthcare information stays within the security of its own network utilising the security of the supplier’s platform but also the added security of the HSCN network itself.
To further compliment ISO 27001 your supplier should have ISO 20000 and ISO 9001. ISO 9001 and 20000 provide assurance that the platform and the support given to you meets the highest quality and that the provider is committed to delivering the highest of data security and service
How does Involve deliver security via medio.link?
As an experienced provider of secure video solutions for more than 20 years, Involve meets and exceeds all of the suggested criteria in security and reliability, creating the most secure video platform available for the healthcare industry. Involve is 100% committed to keeping your call and your data safe.
To find out more about medio.link, get in touch now.
H’s Experience of using Virtual Clinic
Using Virtual Clinics for Speech and Language Therapy
By Jayne Ramirez Inscoe, Advanced Specialist in Communication, Nottingham Auditory Implant Programme
H was 15 years old when he was re-referred to the Nottingham Auditory Implant Programme (NAIP). His hearing loss had deteriorated to the point where the best acoustic hearing aids could not provide him with adequate hearing for speech.
Living with his family in Hereford, he understood that he would have to miss school and study time and travel to and from Nottingham in order to receive cochlear implants, during the year running up to his GCSE preparation. As a teenager, we knew that H himself would need to be motivated in order to achieve his potential with the new cochlear implant technology.
Whilst waiting for the operation, H proudly showed me his new smartphone, which he could not use to make conventional phone calls as he could not hear effectively, however we discussed some of the innovative ways that NAIP and the implant manufacturers were trialling internet applications for patients to check and control what they were hearing, and how virtual clinics were being used as an alternative to face-to-face appointments for some patients. H was highly motivated and interested in using these applications himself.
Over the first 6 months, clinicians offered rehab support at school and in the clinic. H needed to learn to trust the increased access to speech afforded by his cochlear implant technology. He continued to mishear and misperceive words, particularly in challenging listening conditions and needed to remember to clarify what had been said. H was interested in trying a virtual clinic at home out of school hours for subsequent rehab appointments, avoiding the need for him to miss lessons.
The impact of implementing Virtual Clinic
Virtual Clinic allowed the clinician to have a dialogue with H about how things were going, meaning his parents could observe how he was able to speak for himself, ask and answer questions and to cope with communication breakdown and repair. By using Virtual Clinic, H was able to use his excellent lip-reading to support his listening, and he gained the confidence to make more video calls with family and friends as an alternative to conventional phone calls.
The clinician has been able to monitor H’s progress with his cochlear implants and offer advice as effectively as face-to-face visits, saving travel time and costs for both the clinician and the family. But the biggest gains have been in H’s increased independence, use of effective communication strategies and ability to make video calls with family and friends. H hopes to study Drama in the future, and the skills he has developed using Virtual Clinic will be essential for a successful career.
NATURAL LEGACY WOOLLEN COFFINS CELEBRATES ITS 10th BIRTHDAY
In 2009 the UK premier woollen mill, AW Hainsworth, joined forces with the leading coffin manufacturer JC Atkinsons to develop and launch a world first
United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust utilises medio.link on their MDT suite
Involve have provided United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust (ULH), one of the biggest acute hospital trusts in England, with state-of-the-art MDT rooms with medio.link connectivity across multiple sites. The trust, whose vision is to provide ‘excellence in rural healthcare’, has three hospitals which need to collaborate to provide the best patient-centred care possible for more than 720,000 people.
John Minett, Telecoms Engineer at ULH, said: “We already had three MDT rooms across three of the sites, but they were in need of an upgrade. The equipment was outdated and had become unreliable, and the cost to support the solution had become too expensive. We wanted a more modern solution which allowed us to view medical images and communicate, with a user-friendly system.
“We have a long-standing relationship with Involve and have been really pleased solutions they have provided us in the past, so when they answered our tender by offering us a cost-effective solution which met all of our needs, we were happy to choose Involve as our supplier for this project.”
As a trusted partner of ULH, Involve’s Healthcare team consulted the Trust’s ICT and Cancer Services department, to redesign and upgrade three key clinical and operation rooms (MDTs) across the three main hospital sites. Involve’s highly skilled engineering team installed multiple large format professional 65” HD 1080p displays in the MDT rooms and Cisco videoconferencing was deployed across all rooms, plus a host of other equipment to make a first-class MDT room.
All of these rooms are connected to Involve’s N3 hosted service platform, medio.link, with integrated multiparty conferencing capabilities. The systems are controlled by an intuitive control system and a customised interface, with simplicity for users at its heart. A range of existing clinical systems and imaging was integrated into the design and build, enabling two-way content sharing of data with any internal and external sites, allowing multiple participants to join regardless of location and device they connected with, and still see video and content.
The Trust have been using both medio.link, powered by Involve, and BT Engage to provide video and audio connectivity to their MDT rooms.
John added: “We have had meetings with the clinicians who use the MDT rooms about when the BT service is switched off this year, and the feedback from them is that they wish to use medio.link as the main video conferencing platform as it works well and is a good alternative to BT Engage. We would recommend Involve and medio.link, and we regularly do recommend medio.link to other Trusts.”
Speaking about the new solution and how it has benefited the Trust, John said: “The solution is much more reliable than the one we had before, there are significantly fewer breakdowns and the support Involve offers is great so we know if there is a breakdown it will be well-handled. The solution is also much more user-friendly, which meets our initial objectives so we’re happy with the work Involve have done.”
To find out more about the medio.link MDT video service, visit our MDT page or get in touch.
Happy Birthday Virtual Clinic
It’s now 1 year since we launched the Virtual Clinic service and we could not be prouder of what we have achieved in our first year. To begin with, we built a remote clinical consultation service that completely aligns with recommendations as laid out by Royal College of General Practitioners (see recommendations here).
Secondly, we are extremely proud of our reference sites, customer relationships and genuine partnerships that we have built in this short time. See below …
Nottingham University Hospitals & Macmillan
37% of appointments in the brain metastases clinic were held via Virtual Clinic
“The feedback from patients has been unanimously positive, with them citing that they found the time they saved from avoiding travelling, and the prevention of disruption as the main benefits from using the Virtual Clinic platform. 95% of patients involved in the pilot have said they would like to continue seeing their clinician via Virtual Clinic.”
Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust
“We have already had 135 staff attend Virtual Clinic training sessions, and we hope 20% of patients with follow-up appointments will use the service. As the use of the service develops, we want to offer every clinician in the hospital their own Virtual Clinic, to continue improving patient care by using digital solutions. This is the start of a journey for Leeds Teaching Hospitals.”
Here’s what we do / don’t do:
And, our commitment to development doesn’t stop there…
New for 2019, we are launching a Virtual Waiting Room (VWR) option, available as standard, no extra cost.
Just like a real waiting room, the VWR holds patients until a specialist is ready to see them.
Keep watching this space to learn more.
Affordable
By simply replacing 2 in-person consultations per day with virtual, video-based consultations from medio.link, it breaks down to the equivalent price of a high street cup of coffee per consultation.
If you would like any more information, a demonstration or even a free trial, use our contact form to register your interest and we’ll be in touch.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust rolls out Virtual Clinic
Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust (LTHT) are leading the way in digital transformation by offering outpatient appointments via video, using the Virtual Clinic platform by Involve Visual Collaboration, a market-leading company in delivering digital solutions in healthcare.
Rob Child, Programme Head of Digital Health Programmes for LTHT had a steering role in rolling out Virtual Clinics across the Trust. “LTHT have been working with efficiencies to improve the care provided by the hospitals, and Virtual Clinics were on our radar. The Informatics department understands the importance of the changing nature and demands of providing care, and digital tools can help to meet those demands. Many services within LTHT came to us asking to use Skype or FaceTime to hold video consultations, however, these platforms aren’t secure or configured to hold Virtual Clinics, so we made the decision to find a suitable platform” says Rob.
LTHT and Involve already had an established relationship, through a pilot of Virtual Clinic with the Trust’s Radiology team, which was in conjunction with Nottingham University Hospitals Oncology team and Macmillan. The successful pilot within the Radiology team opened further conversation between Involve and the LTHT Digital Transformation team.
“Our Radiology department were already using Virtual Clinic, so we started conversations with Ben Cattell from Involve and started to see the art of the possible. We offered Virtual Clinic to all services across LTHT, and most of them wanted to be part of the pilot. 61 Virtual Clinic Accounts have been deployed across 29 departments, offering video consultations to outpatients in a variety of use cases” continues Rob.
The use of Virtual Clinics will benefit patients in several ways: mental health patients will have appointments over video allowing them to remain at home, children with Cystic Fibrosis who have an infection risk will use Virtual Clinic for interactions and the service will be used to reduce the amount of travelling time for patients. Plus, Virtual Clinic will be used by dispersed services across 5 sites to link the services, therefore offering collaborative care.
Ben Cattell from Involve worked with LTHT to kickstart the project: “I collaborated with Rob Child and Andrew Webster, Consultant in Emergency Medicine and Chief Clinical Information Officer CCIO for Clinical and Medical, to scope a rollout of Virtual Clinic across the Trust, leading to deployment in 29 departments, covering the majority of teams dealing with outpatients and community-based services across the LTHT catchment area. We’re excited about this project and are committed to the success of revolutionising Leeds outpatient’s appointments and assisting the Trust in adhering to the NHS 10-year plan.”
Rob discusses the start of the innovative project and the aims for the future, “we have already had 135 staff attend Virtual Clinic training sessions, and we hope 20% of patients with follow-up appointments will use the service. As the use of the service develops, we want to offer every clinician in the hospital their own Virtual Clinic, to continue improving patient care by using digital solutions. This is the start of a journey for Leeds Teaching Hospitals.”
To find out more about Virtual Clinic, get in touch to speak to one of our specialists.
The Importance of Early 11+ Preparation
The Importance of Early 11+ Preparation was first seen on Accelerate Learning Centres. There are a number of simple and informal things that parents can