Chief Nurse’s latest blog

Nurses are using technology at an ever-increasing rate to enhance the care we provide to patients.

To make the most of the latest innovations in technology, we have introduced a new role, appointing Christian Ward as Associate Director of Nursing covering both The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (RWT) and Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust.

The role was created to ensure we enhance patient care with our digital systems and nurses have a clear voice in digital discussions.

It also means nurses can fully participate in digital transformation, and Christian is very excited to have been chosen to cover the digital innovation portfolio.

There is a lot of complexity across Christian’s role as he works across the collaborative group with both Trusts that are at different stages of their digital transformation.

Our nursing vision is to:

• Empower nurses to practice and lead in a digitally enabled organisation with nursing practice fully supported by digital technology
• Ensure we have digital nurses who can develop a shared vision of digitally-enabled care for nursing
• Have nurses in all care settings – hospital, primary care or community – to identify future data and digital opportunities to join up care
• Use digital solutions to reduce documentation burdens and strengthen communication
• Only digitalise safe processes and systems to support digitally enabled nursing care. As a result, nurses will be able to provide the best possible care with the highest safety thresholds and lowest risk
• Work towards providing improved digital and data literacy within nursing and address digital literacy in our patient population to ensure patients are able to access the best possible care and support

We use the data collected to benefit research and patient care quality improvements to develop better services and treatments in the future.

Christian is looking forward to working with different staff groups and supporting their innovation projects, so please feel free to contact him via email at christian.ward@nhs.net

Take care,

Ann-Marie