With over 13,000 staff working across five hospitals, some of our immediate challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic were: keeping staff and volunteers informed about – and engaged with – rapidly changing developments; avoiding unnecessary cross-site travel; enabling as many staff as possible to work from home; minimising face-to-face patient contact; and ensuring our communities and stakeholders could continue to be involved in our work.
We had already begun a gradual roll out of Microsoft Teams to help our staff connect, engage and collaborate, with each other as well as with external audiences. Staff really wanted to reduce email traffic and to have more ‘human interaction’. With the start of the pandemic, we rapidly escalated the roll out so that the core functionality – video calls, meetings and chat – was available to all staff by March 16th using their nhs.net login. We developed and shared guidance on how to get the best from this functionality via our intranet and promoted it through a daily all-staff coronavirus bulletin. Since the introduction of Teams we have seen close to 30% of our colleagues log in and the participation in Teams meetings has steadily risen to 8,700 attendances per week, Teams is also being used to make 4,800 calls and to send and receive 70,000 chat messages.
At the same time, we continued with a smaller number of teams and services across the Trust to develop a structured approach to setting up Teams channels to support projects working which we are rolling out at a slower pace to maintain effective governance, to date 145 Teams collaboration areas have been set up. We were also able to access Teams Live Events which allows us to run live streamed sessions for up to 10,000 people with interactive Q&A. We manage this centrally within the communications team, training a small number of ‘approved’ users as event ‘producers’, as it is a more specialist application for major events. We have seen close to 1,000 colleagues join these sessions live.
We feel that we have reached a critical mass in use of Teams and we are finding that staff are discovering new benefits all of the time. For example, clinical teams used it to set up permanent video links into COVID wards and units, minimising the number of staff who had to don PPE and enter these higher risk areas. Multi-disciplinary teams have used Teams communication, meetings and collaboration areas to co-ordinate COVID-19 response groups, hold weekly clinical briefings and support our major strategic programmes. As we are part of the nhs.net Office 365 (O365) service Teams has also enable our colleagues to collaborate easily with colleagues from other trusts, primary care groups, CCGs and external partners. We have run several all-staff briefing sessions and Q&As as well as staff network events and even team quiz night socials. We are continuing to run our private and public board meetings on Teams, with one of the benefits being that a recording can be posted online almost immediately for anyone not able to make the live event.
Work is under way now to integrate Teams with our Trust intranet and to adopt the NHS Digital employee data link to O365 and Teams which will automate colleague access to relevant content and organisation groups. As we continue to drive adoption of Teams and O356 across the Trust we will start to introduce further capabilities based on Microsoft PowerApps and Dynamics 365 to support the streamlining of our operational business processes.