North East Lincolnshire Council (NELC)

Outcome of Expression of Interest: Invited to apply

We’ve recently completed a 12 week discovery piece on Domiciliary Care, from this project it emerged locally there are issues around service users taking their medication.
1) Carers help administer medication and sign to say the patient has taken, on occasions without the knowledge of what the medication is for

2) There are no clear reminders to prompt the service user to take their medication and a way of describing the individual tablets / what they are for / insight behind tablets – what is the tablets function? Person taking tablets know why they are important
We believe we would be able to find a solution and find partners for Alpha and test with other Council users and CCGs. We have engaged with a range of potential partners recently at a hack event who all cited medications as a serious issue.
We will work in partnership with any local authorities and CCGs who are interested in this.
We have an agile service design team ready to kick off this Alpha piece. We would like some support around using Alexa technology for delivering reminders and description plus information advice and guidance for what the service user are being treated for.

Discovery evidence

From our Domiciliary Care discovery we have heard that enabling support to Carers administering medicine safely is an area ripe for change.
For carers to administer medicines, this needs to be part of the users care plan and documented by a clinician or social worker. This does not mean that users can be made to take medicines and is entirely voluntary.
Locally we’ve experienced a husband and a wife’s medication being mixed up with the husband ending up critically ill in hospital.
A further case study shows that service users may not take their medicines by forgetfulness or that the medications make them ill, may ultimately hide them or put them in the bin.
This means that clinicians are working blind to prescribe for specific ailments ignorant of the fact that the patient is not taking them and this has severe consequences of overdosing if recommencing taking the medications.
NELC and CCG recently jointly attended The Humber Care Tech hack event. 12 teams took part and all shared experiences of medication issues known to their services. We are really interested in how the issue can be resolved, produce a prototype and take into the next stage.

https://share.nelincs.gov.uk/the-local-digital-fund/

Username-LDDNEL

Password-SDNEL

  • Digital and agile awareness
  • Introduction to service design
  • Introduction to product management
  • Agile for teams

Other training requests

It is important that all collaborators have a common language and approach. We have adopted agile delivery principles and have adapted to meet the needs of our business in doing so. This for us may be different from the purist view and learning around agile that GDS adopt. However, it is recognised that our practice may differ and if we do not think about agile practice together we all risk reverting to what we know. At NELC, we have a view of our gaps in knowledge and skills and is reflected in the training courses selected. We'd like to develop skills around using Alexa technology also.