Connecting Maternity and Health Visitors with New Euroking Module
Maternity departments have worked incredibly hard to ensure consistent high-quality care for patients during the pandemic. They replicated the in-person appointment structure as closely as possible to prevent details being overlooked as appointments move to telephone or video consultations.
Postnatal care has also been significantly impacted, with in-person visits from both midwives and health visitors restricted. In some areas of the UK, as many as 63 percent of health visitors were redeployed to help with the coronavirus, and only 21 percent of parents with babies aged two months or under have had a face-to-face appointment according to family support organisation Home-Start. However, Cornwall Council health visiting services were one of the few services that continued to deliver through the pandemic.
Bridging the communication gap
It is important that new mothers feel supported after being discharged from hospital and that Health Visitors are able to meet the Key Performance Indicators set by the NHS Child Programme. That is why our long-time Euroking customer Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust approached us to develop a Health Visitor Module for Euroking to improve communication between hospital and community-based services.
The Health Visitor Module is a broad ‘home health’ risk management process whereby the maternity team will refer a new mother to the health visitor team who will triage them to ensure they are assessed and on the correct pathway, either universal, targeted or specialist depending on need.
The Health Visitor Module is a separate workflow that both the maternity and health visitor team can access, which makes it easier to see what information has been recorded at a glance and decreases duplication of efforts. The maternity team is required to notify the health visitors that a woman is pregnant at 25 weeks for 1st time mums, 28 weeks for 2nd time mums and so on, which historically would have been emailed to the health visitor team but is now completed through a shared electronic referral form.
The system, which was requested and briefed by the health visitor team, gives them access to the referral forms which offer more detailed information so they can organise their home visits accordingly. While it was specifically requested by the health visitors, there is added value for the maternity team as it acts as a system for collecting antenatal contacts.
Angela Whittaker, Lead Digital Midwife and project lead, at Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust said: “The health visitors and midwives have already given us great feedback and the system has only been live for a few weeks. The user experience so far has been seamless as it looks and feels like the existing Euroking platform, so the team feels completely comfortable with it.
“Overall, it has proven to be a more efficient process for recording antenatal notes and a safer way of informing health visitors of newly pregnant women. It has greatly improved the communication between our maternity and health visitor teams, and we’re grateful that Wellbeing Software took the time to build a bespoke module for the trust.”
Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust has been a Euroking user since 2017, and they are dedicated to improving services and adopting digital transformation in maternity. You can find out more about our work with the trust, including their use of Euroking Personal Health Record (PHR) here.
You can also read more about our maternity software here.
