Innovative Healthcare Delivery Programme

BLOG: IHDP 2021 Highlights

As the end of the year draws near, our Chief Operating Officer Fi Strachan reviews highlights from 2021

We recently had our second virtual end-of-year celebration via Teams and reflected back on 2021. Despite the lack of in-person connections over the year, we are really proud of all that we’ve achieved this year and are looking forward to plans for 2022. Here are some of our highlights:

National SACT dashboard

Since the beginning of the pandemic and into 2021, we supported Public Health Scotland in the rapid development of a dashboard to monitor national cancer chemotherapy (Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy) utilisation on a weekly basis. The dashboard has been used proactively by the National Cancer Recovery Group (chaired by Professor Aileen Keel, Director of IHDP) to record the initial large drop in utilisation and take action to support the subsequent recovery to pre-COVID levels.

A publicly available version of the dashboard is available on the Public Health Scotland COVID-19 wider impacts webpage under the Cancer tab.

SCRIS user engagement

We’re proud of our progress with user engagement with the Scottish Cancer Registry and Intelligence Service (SCRIS). Between delivering a webinar to over 200 attendees, hosting a workshop for the cancer research community in Scotland and providing a range of resources for health professionals, we feel current and prospective users have a better understanding of SCRIS and how it could help them in their roles. We’re looking forward to rolling out some further developments in the future. Meanwhile, find out more on the SCRIS website.

IHDP toolkit

Using a Learning Healthcare Systems approach, we have developed a toolkit to support policy and clinical teams to improve health intelligence. This builds on our work in leading the development of the Scottish Cancer Intelligence Framework and draws on evidence gathered as part of our impact and legacy workstream.

The potential impact of the toolkit was recently recognised by one of our partners through the Cancer Research UK Policy, Information and Communications Directorate annual Evidence-based staff award to Karen Seditas for her work in leading the development of the toolkit. The toolkit will be launched in early 2022 and will help IHDP support others to realise the vision of harnessing the power of informatics to link NHS Scotland’s rich data assets and deliver value rapidly to patients, healthcare professionals, and the wider NHS.

Our work beyond cancer data

We have been working closely with colleagues in the policy team at Scottish Government and the Scottish Cardiac Audit Programme in PHS to support the development of a strategic approach to cardiac data in Scotland for the benefit of patients in Scotland.

Looking ahead…

Looking ahead to next year, we’ll continue to build on our existing partnerships and have plans to host a number of online events engaging with clinicians, policymakers and patients, with the ultimate aim of improving patient care through better use of data across the NHS in Scotland.

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In the meantime, best wishes from the IHDP team