Midwives and staff at Southport & Ormskirk Hospitals NHS Trust last week went live with Medway Maternity in a big-bang launch across two acute hospital maternity sites. This is System C’s 20th maternity deployment in five years.

The Trust also simultaneously deployed the Medway Maternity off-line community module. This allows community midwives to collect and update data in pre-populated forms and sync later, with both systems contributing to a single, integrated maternity record.

The move to digital record keeping from paper-based processes will also provide The Trust with richer data and analysis that will help staff keep improving the quality of care mothers and babies receive.

Within its first 3 days of go-live, Medway Maternity had been used to record 22 bookings (7 conducted in the community), 547 antenatal assessments (148 in the community), 75 postnatal assessments (1 in the community) and 18 deliveries.

Over 300 staff are now using the clinical software, working in various clinics, triage and assessment units, delivery suites, antenatal and postnatal wards and remotely in GP surgeries, children’s centres and patients’ homes.

Matt Connor, Head of IT, said the deployment had been one of the smoothest he had seen, “all the more impressive because the off-line community module was deployed at the same time”.

Clinical feedback has also been very positive, with many benefits already highlighted by users in terms of processes and procedures. IT project midwives, Rebecca Owens and Joanne Unsworth said feedback in the first three days included:

• In the triage and assessment ward, midwives are using the system to record telephone assessments directly onto the system in real time. This speeds up processes and the use of headsets means they can talk and type at the same time.
• Midwives are able to track the number of calls a woman makes in a defined period of time and tailor their advice appropriately.
• Postnatal documents can be generated on the postnatal wards, speeding the discharge process and improving bed management.
• Medway Maternity provides an immediate view on the staff home page of which women have been booked on admission and those who require booking.This contributes to the completeness of maternity data set (MSDS) returns.
• In antenatal clinics, an ‘assign’ function in Medway Maternity workflows allows doctors and midwives to collaborate and work together on record keeping.
• In the community, midwives are able to upload assessments without having to return to a base. This reduces their time travelling.
• In the delivery suite, midwives are able to record intrapartum and delivery data at the bedside using wall-mounted computers. They no longer have to leave the woman unattended to return to the nurses’ station computer.

The first baby to be born using Medway Maternity was a boy, Bailey James Taylor. His NHS number was obtained successfully using PDS and Ormskirk’s Medway patient administration system generated the hospital number. Both numbers were successfully recorded in the baby’s record on Medway Maternity. 
Markus Bolton, joint chief executive of System C, said: “We work hard at integrating our acute and community solutions and making them easy to use,” said Markus Bolton, joint chief executive of System C. “We are delighted that the go-live has gone so smoothly and that the solution is so well-liked.”