The Blog: 4 October 2021

Data Saves Lives

Welcome to the first of my monthly blogs, where I’ll try and give you more insight into what I’m working on and our future plans as an organisation. By writing to you monthly, rather than weekly, I hope to give more detail about ideas and innovations which aim to keep Mersey Care at the forefront of the healthcare debate.

I’d like to focus this month’s blog on the importance of data. Most of you will have been to meetings where a slide has been presented with data on it, which quite often informs us on demand for services, costs and such like. We’re swimming in data but are we awash with intelligence?

We know that, used effectively, data saves lives. So much so, the latest strategy document by the Department of Health and Social Care is titled: Data saves lives: reshaping health and social care with data^[i] and details how data sharing helped shape the battle against the pandemic.

Accessing data from different sources has helped drive the national response to COVID-19 and, here in Cheshire and Merseyside, we’re already leading the way by using data in innovative ways to be better prepared for the demand on services.

Mersey Care has joined forces with the University of Liverpool’s Institute for Population Health, partnering with health software company Graphnet, to produce a data platform called ‘Combined Intelligence for Population Health Action (CIPHA). It was fast tracked into action during the pandemic after the absence of health data undermined system wide actions.

So how has CIPHA helped us? How has it enabled us to react to some of the most challenging times in the history of the NHS? Here are just some of its successes:

There is no doubt the CIPHA technology helped the journey towards returning to ‘normal’, helping shops, businesses, pubs, restaurants and transport services reach a place where it was safe to open their doors once again.

We should not underestimate in any way how this will have helped the population’s general mental health – it’s a great example of the breadth and range of what we’re doing in the trust and shows the importance of resilience and scale. It’s a good example, too, of the power of meaningful, data driven partnerships.

As we hopefully continue to move towards a safer society, this technology will be overseen by the Integrated Care System but driven by a multi-skilled team including NHS analysts, local authority public health and their intelligence teams.

Mersey Care intends to continue working alongside the University of Liverpool on a ‘Connected Mental Health’ approach using the CIPHA platform and develop advanced technologies to aid risk prediction forecasting that will help us with our zero suicide ambition and examine the effects of long COVID as just two examples.

The real thing we need to move towards is acting based on the insights from the data. We need to shift now to look at bringing data to life. We want population health management to be a real opportunity for us to be better informed in the prediction and prevention of ill health, to be evidence based for the innovative redesign of our services and help us better serve those for whom we care.

Annual General Meeting

The Trust’s annual general meeting (AGM) is due to be held again soon, on 14 October, and once again we’ve decided to hold it online to ensure everyone stays safe.

It’s a great opportunity for service users, patients, members of the community and staff colleagues to find out more about the Trust. Both myself and the chairman, Beatrice Fraenkel, will address the meeting and the Trust’s annual report and accounts for 2020/21 will be formally presented.

If you know of anyone who would like to attend, please register your attendance in advance by emailing AGM2021@merseycare.nhs.uk and details of how to submit questions in advance can be found here.

I hope to see you all at the meeting.

Prof Joe Rafferty CBE

Chief Executive