London Deanery

NHS London Deanery fulfils key strategic priority with fry's Online Annual Returns System.

The challenge

NHS London Deanery is responsible for the postgraduate training of around 10,000 doctors & dentists in London. Its Vision is to deliver “World-class education for world-class healthcare”.

In its Strategic Business Plan 2008-2011, London Deanery identified six key priorities. One of these was to improve the collection and analysis of its increasing amount of data. This would be an essential part of providing evidence of its excellence and value in delivering the Vision.

All 75 NHS trusts in London are required to send several annual returns on their delivery of training. There are summary forms as well as individual trainee forms and there is a huge amount of information coming back into the Deanery. The ad-hoc paper and Word/Excel system just wasn't manageable any more. The Deanery needed an online solution that could deal with this information and administration overload.

The solution

fry had worked with the Deanery on several previous projects and we were invited to develop the Online Annual Returns System (OARS). After careful requirements analysis of the current processes and systems, we worked in partnership with the Deanery team to create the OARS system.

OARS is a fully managed solution, so the technical Deanery staff do not have to worry about support or hosting.

The result

fry have taken a complicated brief and delivered a web solution that is both practical and effective
Linda Barton - Web Manager

The system went live with 47 of the 75 trusts in the summer of 2009 and has had very good uptake. There are a large number of people involved in using the system, and it is a testament to the ease of use of the OARS system that no training has been required for the end-users.

Three returns are required to provide the information about the overall training for each of the 47 trusts. These can can be complex and run to many pages with sophisticated workflows and user permissions. Despite the complexity, the various Heads of Training and the Heads of Specialities at each trust have no problem working with the system.

This is only the start as now the recently formed Quality Committee Services (QCS) team at the Deanery will start to analyse the incoming data. The OARS system is based on Open Standards and therefore the QCS team will be able to connect to the data in a large number of ways. This will enable them to use a number of Business Intelligence and analysis tools with OARS.

The Deanery's Quality Management Framework has been developed to fulfil its responsibilities to the Postgraduate Medical Education and Training Board (PMETB). Further enhancements to OARS are envisaged as the Quality Management Board develop KPIs, in conjunction with NHS London, to create benchmarks for both compliance with PMETB standards and excellence.