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An award winning partnership…

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Humber and East Riding Service Improvement Day (SID) and Awards evening with some of the team from the new 72 hour Assessment Unit at Hull’s Royal Infirmary.

The event showcases and celebrates innovation and improvements in local health and social care services across the region.

The surprise of the day was winning the “Innovative Health and Social Care Technology Award” at the events awards dinner.  OpenWard was selected and cited as follows:

“In order for the 72 hour assessment area (ward) at Hull Royal Infirmary to maximise patient flow there was a need to highlight any delays within the patient pathway.

To achieve this the Cayder “Patient Status at a Glance” system was implemented.  The system was designed by ward staff in conjunction with the company, and offers a relevant and effective tool for consultants and nursing staff to identify patient status and flow.  This tool can be viewed from any authorised location in the Trust.

Its greatest success has been to help achieve an average length of stay of 2.6 days for patients.”

This is a wonderful accolade for us and the 72 hour team at Hull who also won the prestige “People’s Choice Award” at the event.

We are now jointly preparing a submission for the national SID awards which will be judged later in the year.

Watch this space!

m

What’s so special about Cayder (apart from our product) I hear you say? Well in order to answer that question fully you would have to ask our Customers. As far as I am concerned it’s the relationship we forge with our customers.

How do we forge this great relationship you may ask sceptically?

Quite simple really!

1. We know who the customer is – yes it’s the Chief Executive or Finance Director who decides to buy our product in the first place but more importantly it’s all the staff on the wards using Openward. We work with the doctors and nurses to produce the version of Openward which is the best fit for their patients.
2. We don’t talk techy – I’ve had experience myself of talking to technical experts who are very intelligent people and obviously extremely knowledgeable in their field. However, I’ve been left feeling quite foolish and really quite intimidated (not their fault). I’m willing to bet we’ve all been there at one point or another. It doesn’t have to be that way!  The customer explains to us in plain English what they want and need and we do the rest.
3. We care! – yes sounds very much like something you might hear coming from the mouths of one of the leaders in the recent election campaign and you may meet it with an equal amount of scepticism. You are entitled but you would be wrong. We do care! We care about providing a quality product that makes a real and tangible difference. Not only improving the working life of the users of our product but ultimately the patient’s experience of the NHS. We do this in part by having an inclusive relationship with our customer. We recognise we can’t provide a quality product without our customers input and feedback.

Don’t believe us? Ask our customers

Here ends the party political broadcast for Cayder!!!!

Kim

I could just throw some adjectives in such as busy, hectic,pressured, flexible, interesting and rewarding but I think I'll expand a little.

Where has the time gone?! I've worked for Cayder for over a year now. It's my first experience of working for a small company always having worked for large organisations in the past. I've learned a lot about the NHS, its structure and what the hospitals who purchase our product are trying to achieve with the help of OpenWard.

The benefits of working for Cayder are that there aren't many tiered levels of bureacracy to wade through before change can be achieved. If you have an idea and its a good one then its acknowledged and implemented. Simple as that!!! No suggestion boxes and lengthy processes of deliberation here.

The flip side of that is of course that there is nowhere to hide. (not that I need to I may add). If you make a mistake then everyone knows it. Luckily, they are a friendly bunch and being burnt at the stake became illegal some time ago.

One of the best aspects for me being a mother of young children is that here is a company not just talking a good story of flexibility around work/life balance but actually practising it. The focus is on getting the work done on time and to the highest achievable standards. How and when its done within the timescales is left up to me.

For me, thats worth its weight in gold!

Having said all that I will still be expecting a pay rise!!!

Kim

Well with so much going on it's hard to know where to start so I'll start with the housekeeping things, we've moved offices, only a little, we outgrew our original office at Kestrel Court (F16) and moved to the top floor and into (S02), the extra space won't be empty long as we're currently expanding our development team taking on an additional 2 developers. We want to ensure that OpenWard continues to develop additional customer driven features and ideas have been coming thick and fast so there we go the team needs to grow.

We also had some exciting news on our customer front with new customers appearing in Community, Mental Health & Acute settings all deciding OpenWard was right for them. Significantly we were also successful in securing our first whole hospital in an open tender that pitched us against some of the biggest names in the industry.

It's been great to see our reporting warehouse finish its internal test cycle and release to one of our customers for acceptance testing, once successfully proven we'll make this available to our other customers over time. Early indications make us think we'll probably enhance the standard reports in OpenWard a little, but not too much.

Finally a big hello to Debbie who's joining the team as well.

S.