South & East Belfast - the broadest implementation of Paris

Dr Gillian Rankin

“Paris provides the provocation and mechanisms with which to engage staff.” - Dr Gillian Rankin, director of service development

In Northern Ireland, South & East Belfast Health & Social Services NHS Trust (SEBT) provides the full range of primary, secondary and tertiary mental health services, all community health services and social care programmes for all groups of vulnerable people. These include mental health, learning disability, physical disability, older people and children’s services.

In what is probably the broadest implementation of Paris anywhere in the world, SEBT is currently rolling out Paris to replace stand-alone health and social care systems. SEBT was the first NHS organisation to create an integrated care record and has been a development partner with in4tek for Paris, originating with the Ithaca project; a European Telematics Research and Development initiative involving nine countries.

SEBT have this month (June) successfully enabled e-mail referrals from GP systems to their call-centre and onto the Paris system and finalised a complete psychiatric hospital Paris implementation. And, in a separate but related development, on 23 June at the Hilton Hotel in London, SEBT was presented with the RIBA Architectural Award for the Arches Community Treatment and Care Centre. ACTCC is one of three new-build developments taking place in tandem with the development and implementation of the new electronic record system.

Covering in excess of 30 different services in healthcare for older people, adults with learning disability or physical disability and people with mental illness, over 1700 staff now use Paris as their main patient/client record, with over 120,000 people registered. They were also the first authority to implement Paris Mobile. Full service implementation with all functionality is expected by 2007.

Director of service development at SEBT, Dr Gillian Rankin, describes Paris as offering, “The opportunity and potential to open up silos to see what other colleague professionals are recording. Then to be able take staff through the experience of realising that there is significant duplication of processes such as referrals and assessments recording.”

She adds: “Paris provides the provocation, and the mechanisms with which to engage staff in the process of reducing that duplication, of developing shared understanding and to share processes round assessment. And therefore, be enabled to properly streamline the care plan.”