QIPP isn’t all about saving money – at its core is the goal to create an environment in which change and improvement can flourish. A key part of reaching these goals is to ensure NHS staff are given the tools, techniques and support needed to improve the quality of care they provide.

Silverbear Health is a software solution which has been designed specifically for NHS trusts and aspiring trusts and PCTs. The solution utilises the power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to help trusts manage member relationships, communications, campaigns and member feedback. Members include GPs, Community Centres, Hospitals, Members of the Public, Patients, Carers, Volunteers, Members of Staff, and anyone connected to the Health sector.

Quality
Communication is the key to human interactions, happiness and satisfaction. Only by communicating and engaging effectively with the community can trusts and PCTs improve the quality of their services. Silverbear Health gives you the tools needed to give and receive information in a variety of mediums. Letters, phone, email, SMS, websites and social media are all platforms people use to communicate nowadays, and it’s vital that trusts can effectively select and use the right platform for the right audience.

Innovation
Silverbear Health gives trusts and PCTs tools to measure and track their levels of service. Forums and surveys are all included as standard and we’ve seen our customers use these to learn about the thoughts, ideas and feelings of their local community. Surveying local patients can lead to suggestions and ideas that may not have otherwise been voiced.

Surveys and reports can also be used to find out what the local community actually needs. Learning about the make-up of the patients in the area means that services/support groups can be provided in accordance with what is actually needed.

Procurement
Silverbear Health is based on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. This, combined with Silverbear’s integration specialists means that we can connect into other software solutions seamlessly – meaning that trusts can use Silverbear Health to effectively monitor and log inventories throughout the organisation.

Prevention
Knowing and understanding the local community means that trusts and PCTs can fully understand where and how to allocate their resources. The results of reporting and intelligent information gathering, alongside analysis of patient information can be used in a variety of ways to help with preventative activities.

Without an understanding of the local community, trusts and PCTs are unable to effectively work with them to help prevent health issues. Silverbear Health lets you understand your community and identify groups at risk. It then gives trusts and PCTs the tools to communicate effectively with each group.

To read the full article, please visit the Silverbear Health website: http://www.silverbearhealth.co.uk

The use of email as an effective marketing tool has been rapidly increasing since the early 1990s, there are many benefits of using email as a communication tool, especially in the NHS:

Convenience

• An email can be sent and received anytime, anywhere (internet connection pending) in a matter of seconds
• Email can be used to send information to patients that they would generally have to write down by hand – i.e. addresses, phone numbers, advice and instructions on prescriptions, pre and post-operative guidance etc
• Emails are not generally limited in terms of length or size. Also it is straightfoeard to forward added digital records as attachments

Access

• It may be a lot easier to contact those with disabilities or people living in remote areas with email
• There is an amplified opportunity for information sharing. When the recent Swine Flu pandemic swept the UK, emails with guidance on how to reduce the spread of the disease were sent out from the NHS, but they were forwarded on by community members to a wider audience (their other friends and family)
• Many may find email quicker and more comfortable tool to use when reporting objectionable incidents or placing a criticism
• It enables patients to talk about and forward content of messages with family members or friends to help improve their understanding

Satisfaction

• Email can often be seen as a more relaxed manner of communication and as such, might prompt community members to boost their rate of conversation and boost the level of communication intimacy
• Email cam also offer a level of anonymity which can be a welcomed attribute at specific times
• The speed of email communications makes it a desired option for many people
• It can be very sueful to contact community members that are traditionally tricky to connect with by conventional face-to-face contact

Quality of Care

• Doctors and other health professionals are able to consult with people before crearing and sending emails to provide a more considered approach
• Email generates a written record of consulations and can stop potential problems of scrawled handwritten notes (doctors are after all famous for their handwriting!)

Efficiency

• Health professionals can use email to send one message to numerous (sometimes hundreds of thousands) community members at one time
• Email can give some immense potential cost savings. Email is often viewed as an attractive low cost substitute to posting letters to patients

Using a membership management software solution built specifically for the NHS enables trusts to manage their email communication with ease, helping to enhance the effectiveness of the growth and recruitment campaigns by:

• Targeting, recruiting and increasing new community members
• Developing and managing active membership involvement
• Personalising and group members
• Defining level of membership involvement
• Developing partnership and stakeholder engagement
• Giving appropriate information to sustain amplified membership and bigger levels of involvement with trusts
• Improving the outcomes of partnerships to maximise joint working and financial benefits
• Making certain change has positive outcomes for both staff and patients
• Continuously growing, sustaining and retaining membership communities

Allowing your members to have a say encourages active particiaption on both sides and can help to form a better community.

The Community Involvement Solution for the NHS is part of the portfolio of solutions from Silverbear Ltd. The Community Involvement Solution assists existing and aspiring NHS Foundation Trusts to attain retail and maintain their membership engagement strategy, ensuring they meet the requirements set out by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Please contact Silverbear Health if you would like more information.

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In 2004, The Health Service Ombudsman, Ann Abraham, reported that a lot of the complaints brought against the NHS were brought on by poor communication by health service staff. In consequence of this, recommendations were implemented to try to enhance the levels of communication between the NHS trusts and their local community members.

Since then, NHS Foundation Trusts and aspiring trusts have been trying to their levels of communication with a precise focus on the methods of communication they make use of. Never-ending technological developments mean that community members can now be contacted by a range of tools. For example, contacting teens regarding STD check-ups via letter has shown to not be nearly as successful as contacting them through mobile text messaging (SMS). On the other hand, contacting elderly patients in the community via SMS is would most certainly have a very poor response rate!

In order to obtain Foundation Trust status, NHS Trusts must be able to provide evidence to Monitor that they have a well rounded membership base and that they are able to communicate successfully with all demographic groups. Along with communicating with the external community, trusts must be able to provide adequate internal communication also. An example of inadequate internal communication which led to a complaint in 2004 was case E.712/01-02 about the care of a lady who, during the course of less than four weeks in hospital, was under the care of:

•  3 locum consultant geriatricians,
•  one substantive consultant geriatrician and
• a shifting group of more junior medical staff

There were no adequate provisions in place for the handover of the woman’s care from one consultant to another, and not one individual member of staff took accountability for reviewing the care plan as the woman’s condition changed; this led almost inevitably to sub-standard care being given.

In order to avoid complaints arising from inadequate communication and to help improve the level of care provided to patients, NHS trusts are now turning to technology to help control internal and external communication, and with its help can choose and control from a range of communication mediums.

Healthcare Membership Management software solutions can help trusts:

Select the most suitable method of communication for precise member groups

• Produce and deliver the message and
• Track and control the responses and follow up

Part 2 of this blog will be posted in the next couple of days, the second part will cover an example communication method within a membership software, such as email and go into more depth. In the meantime if you would like more information on or would like to discuss Silverbear’s solution for the NHS please Contact us

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Social media is the largest growing area of the Internet. More and more people are logging on and registering themselves with various social networking sites, creating and writing blogs or contributing or creating content in some form. Below are some stats, which were correct as of January 2010:

• LinkedIn has over 50 million members worldwide
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis
• Twitter now has 75 million user accounts
• Flickr now hosts more than 4 billion images
• There are over 200,000,000 blogs on the Internet
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14 million articles
• Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65 million users accessing the site through mobile-based devices

So we can see that more and more people are turning to social media as a way to keep in touch with each other, to share information and to find out about news and events.

The NHS has been given the challenge of becoming more customer-centric. In order for this to happen, NHS trusts must be able to communicate effectively to their customers (who are classed as all stakeholders relating to a particular NHS trust – patients, local community members and employees). For those managing the communication within NHS trusts and aspiring trusts, it is important that they are able to communicate with community members in a format and medium that suits them (the NHS community member). Being able to contact members through their medium of choice adds value to their membership and also ensures that two way communication can be maintained at all times.

So what are the popular ways off keeping in touch with your NHS community base?

• Telephone
• Letters
• Newsletters
• Emails
• Website (e.g; blogging, forums & articles)
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Different community members will have different demands from their local NHS trust. The older generation may place value in the more established forms of communication such as letters and the telephone. However, surveys have shown that all demographics are using social media more than ever. It isn’t something that appeals to the younger generation only, as shown by the below statistics:

• The median age of a Twitter user is 31
• The median age of a MySpace user is 27
• The media age of a Facebook user is 26 – Yet the fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
• The media age of a LinkedIn user is 40 – 80% of companies use LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees

So it’s no longer enough to assume that your NHS community is not and does not want social media as part of their communication options. We are now seeing a generation who hasn’t lived without access to the Internet. This generation is used to being able to access information instantly, in a format they prefer. The NHS is risking missing or alienating these community members entirely if they remain only communicating through traditional methods such as direct mail.

Each form of social media has its benefits and drawbacks. In terms of communicating with NHS community members, social networking sites are most likely to have the greatest impact. Social networking is the way of increasing the number of business and/or social contacts by making connections through individuals. While social networking has gone on almost as long as societies themselves have existed, the unmatched potential of the Internet to promote such connections is only now being fully recognised and exploited, through web-based groups established for that purpose. Popular social networking sites include Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Using these sites to communicate with your NHS community is now an important part of NHS membership management. These sites are all free to use, but do come with an investment of time. The time it may take to manage accounts with the major networking sites and to update each one individually can make the exercise difficult to justify.

However, there are comprehensive NHS focused membership management software solutions available that have social media modules as part of the basic package. These modules enable NHS community managers to manage and update their social media channels from within the one solution – making them quick and easy to maintain.

Social media is just one module of a comprehensive NHS community management solution. Quality software packages will also include email marketing, event management and tools to help boost NHS membership retention and aid membership growth.

To discuss how implementing a membership solution can help you utilise social media to reach your NHS community then please contact Silverbear Health

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The issues faced by existing & aspiring NHS foundation trusts and the need to interact and develop your membership engagement strategy are areas that need to be addressed in order to grow your membership community.

By using the information you collect efficiently & effectively will allow you to define a clear analysis path to identify current & future membership strategies, providing you with a clear visualisation of your community.

Selecting a solution that enables NHS trusts to deliver a comprehensive outreach framework for growth withint their local constituency and being able to personalise your relationship with your local membership community is a very difficult & important decision.

By implementing a fully functional software solution that manages your membership community should allow you to personalise your relationship with your members and ensures the communication and engagement programme delivers pertinent & appropriate interaction with your members whilst continously developing & managing local community relationships. Choosing the right solution will ensure you:

• Target, recruit and increase new members
• Develop and manage active membership involvement
• Personalise and group members
• Define level of membership involvement
• Develop partnership and stakeholder engagement
• Develop and strategise your communication management;
  • Sending, managing and analysing email campaigns
  • Personalised automated invitations and newsletters can be sent on community education and wellness events
  • Sending relevant, targeted and automated surveys (including Experience and Exit Surveys) to public, patient and staff events
• Provide relevant information to support increased membership and increased levels of involvement with the trust
• Develop the experiences of members by engaging them through social marketing channels:
  • Blogs
  • Online forums
  • Social networking sites and interaction with Expert Patient and mentoring programmes
• Improve the outcomes of your partnerships to maximise joint working and financial benefits
• Ensure change has positive outcomes for both staff and patients
• Continuously growing, maintaining and retaining your membership community
• Help you understand your community.

Being able to motivate, re-energise & personalise relations with your local membership community can be successfully achieved by utilising Silverbear’s Community Involvement Solution (CIS).

Please contact Silverbear if you would like to receive further information on our Community Involvement Solution for NHS.

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