Host university: Newcastle University
PhD research project: Using Normalisation Process Theory to enable insights on the factors contributing to strategic readiness for shared care record adoption in the North East and North Cumbria.
Project summary: The importance of delivering safe and effective care to a growing and increasingly complex population have been well documented. Information technology (IT) has been seen as an enabler to this for some time with varying results. The estimated annual NHS budget was £140 billion in 2019/20 (Kings Fund, 2020). Investment in healthcare IT is an estimated 2% (National Audit Office, 2020).
However, NHS and other care organisations in England operate disparate IT systems which cannot easily ‘talk’ to each other: a means of safe, secure and legal information sharing is needed if care conversations are to be informed by a more complete picture of an individual’s health and care data.
The deployment of a multi-agency digital shared care record in England is a recent development and a review of the literature indicates few studies which have focused on this, and none which have utilized the Normalisation Process Theory (NPT) (May et al, 2009). Little attention has been paid to the conditions required for collective strategic readiness in advance of procurement.
In the North East and North Cumbria, a digital shared care record has been enabled by an initiative which became known as the Great North Care Record (GNCR) (Shah et al, 2019) with the procurement of the GNCR Health Information Exchange (HIE) on behalf of the regional health and care economy in 2019.
This research aims to contribute new insights to understandings of large-scale digital deployments in a multi-agency environment. It will use qualitative methods and seek the views of NHS and other sector practitioners involved in GNCR and other comparable information sharing programmes. In turn, the research will test the extent to which NPT can enable insights to be surfaced in the context of health and care shared care records.
My background and research interests: I am a part-time Post Graduate Researcher alongside my NHS role with the North East and North Cumbria Maternity Clinical Network, working with the NENC Local Maternity and Neonatal system as digital strategy lead. I have a long-standing interest in collective learning, groups and networks, particularly in relation to technology development and adoption.
Expected PhD completion date: 2025
Contact: [email protected]
Twitter: @NetworkLouise