NHS Trust wins award for its digital response to COVID-19
An NHS trust in Coventry and Warwickshire has won a prestigious national award for its digital response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust (CWPT) won the Digital Primary Care Award at the 2020 Health Tech Newspaper (HTN) Awards, for the work done by the Trust enabling more than 4,000 users to securely work remotely in preparation for national lockdown in March.
The Trusts introduced a system called Imprivata Confirm ID for Remote Workers, which was rolled out over a weekend ahead of the lockdown in March. Imprivata is the digital identity company for healthcare, which provided free of charge licenses for its identity and authentication management solution for remote working,
Shafiq Khalifa, Associate Director of ITC at CWPT said: “Our task was to provide full remote access to, not just for the clinicians but for all Trust staff, allowing them to access all systems, folders and documents needed to do their jobs when working safely from home.
“We started the deployment of Imprivata ahead of the national lockdown announcement in March, as we wanted to prepare staff to work safely from home, in a way which would enable them to continue to deliver their vital services to the public without interruption.”
Shafiq continued: “Imprivata enabled us to deliver this all over one weekend ahead of the impending lockdown, and meant staff didn’t need to use physical tokens to gain remote access. This enabled a rapid deployment, as there was no need for us to procure, configure and distribute physical tokens for more than 4,000 employees, which would have severely slowed down the process and put people at risk.
“The ITC Team at the Trust were fantastic and worked tirelessly to ensure a successful deployment, and we feel that we played our part in helping provide clinical care.”
The introduction of Imprivita also forms part of CWPT’s Global Digital Exemplar (GDE) programme. The Trust was announced as one of NHS Digital’s GDE Trust’s in February, where it will become a digital forefront for patient care.
This was the fourth HTN Awards, which were held virtually on October 22, 2020. To read the full list of winners, visit: www.thehtn.co.uk/2020/10/22/htn-awards-2020-meet-the-winners/