I'd be interested to hear anyone's answers to this too!

We are looking at options for giving volunteers access to certain clinical systems, and it would be great to know what others are doing and how they overcame any barriers.

Thank you!

Catherine de Zwaan

Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

catherine.dezwaan@nhs.net

Hi both, our project manager @Melissa Griffith has shared with us that for the Fall Prevention project that she led with @Laura Shalev-Greene at Kingston NHS Trust, the service manager gives each volunteer a patient workbook which contains the patient details and any key medical notes. Volunteers record session notes and outcomes within this workbook which they feed back to the service manager. The service manager then updates the 'Access' database with the information. So volunteers do not directly access medical records but the service manager does all the updates for them. Hope this helps? Not sure if @Laura Shalev-Greene wants to comment more on this topic?

@Catherine de Zwaan Hi Catherine, thank you for your reply. I have heard back from our IG leads and we have had a no but I am approaching them further to open up conversation around this. The risks, costs and complications haven't been clearly specified so I am currently looking through the trust IG policy and looking at what these would be and looking at mitigating some of these risks. Once approach I'm clear with is that this will be some not all and carefully assessed with each volunteer. I have also put this on the futures platform and found another trust going through similar.

Very happy to open up conversation and share progress

becky.deane@oxfordhealth.nhs.uk

@Vy Tran Thank you, this is really helpful, this is something we are looking at doing for all volunteers with patient contact, a spreadsheet populated with the necessary information and then the volunteer would add their notes to this. The barrier we have faced with this idea is with stretched services having capacity to complete the admin and with one service in particular feeling the volunteers could end up creating more work for a stretched team. Did you face anything like this with your workbooks, obviously the team need to make these up and populate the information. Was there any concerns from the service manager around their ability to do this and also then regularly update the clinical notes?

@Becky Deane Great questions, Becky. May I ask if @Melissa Griffith or @Laura Shalev-Greene can help with the questions?