NHS Trusts to drive better performance using Covalent

Published by Covalent_Software for Covalent Software in Health and also in Communities

Tees Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust and NHS East Riding of Yorkshire are the latest NHS organisations to join the Covalent community.

Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust was formed on April 1, 2006 following the merger of the highly successful Tees and North East Yorkshire NHS Trust and County Durham and Darlington Priority Services NHS Trust. It supports the 1.4 million people living in County Durham, the Tees Valley and North East Yorkshire with a range of mental health, learning disability and addictive behaviour services.

NHS East Riding of Yorkshire was created on 1 October 2008 and replaced the East Riding of Yorkshire PCT which was created on October 1, 2006. It serves a population of around 325,000 and covers a large geographical area ranging from rural farming areas, urban areas, developing market towns and picturesque villages in the Wolds to the busy coastal strip. Its aim is to improve the health of local people, provide locally based health services and commission a choice of services from hospitals and others for the people living in the area.

Both Trusts will be using Covalent to track performance indicators, manage action/improvement plans and corporate risks and to conduct self assessments and prepare for inspections. NHS East Riding of Yorkshire will also publish performance information on the internet using the Covalent web publishing module.

Speaking on its decision to adopt Covalent, NHS East Riding of Yorkshire's Performance Manager Jill Burdall said, "We plan to use Covalent to manage most of our performance agenda – we will be loading national PIs (including Vital Signs/Existing Commitments), our Health Strategy programme targets and action plans, Use of Resources, World Class Commissioning outcome measures and hopefully some quality measures later on. We want to be more proactive in our performance management, and promote ownership of targets by giving managers easy access to up to date performance information that is relevant to them. The Board and senior management will have online access to an instant overview of the PCT’s current performance. We’re excited about this development and are looking forward to sharing ideas with other Covalent users."

On its choice of Covalent, Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust's Head of Corporate Performance Sarah Theobald said, "The focus of the performance solution is to report electronically, performance at Trust, Service and Ward/Team through a series of dashboards/reports. This solution would replace the existing excel based system which was both time consuming and ‘not fit for purpose’. Whilst there are other modules within Covalent which may be of benefit to the Trust, the immediate priority is ‘Performance Indicators’."

For more information on Covalent for NHS Trusts, please click here.