From Letters to Lifelines: A Conversation with Oxleas NHS Trust, Episode 2

DrDoctor Co-founder & CEO, Tom Whicher and Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust CCIO, James Woollard and CDIO, Alison Furzer continue their conversation on digital transformation at Oxleas.

They look at why digital change in mental health and community services is less a tech problem and more a people-and-process one, unpacking staff assumptions, the tension between clinician control and patient agency, moving from time-based to data-based follow-ups, and what actually unlocks adoption.

Here's what they discussed:

• Culture > tech: Some of the biggest blockers are actually behavioural, like assumptions about patient preferences and worries about getting things “wrong”

• Patient agency shift: Let patients choose if they want to move to digital, instead of staff deciding who is "appropriate"
• Clinical leadership matters: Successful uptake correlates with senior clinical champions who tolerate a period of double-running and drive new ways of working
• Boots-on-the-ground enablement: Admin teams guiding patients through first-time logins during calls builds “muscle memory” and cuts future phone traffic
• Friction is fatal: Even small hurdles push staff to “least-worst” paper choices; embed access and simplify IG flows
• IG as an enabler: Modern information governance is collaborative, shifting from blocking to pragmatically enabling safe, high-ROI use
• Integration vs surfacing: Technical integration has improved, but the win is where and how information is surfaced for staff and patients 
• From read-only to transactional: Shared care records need to evolve from viewing data to acting on it 
  

Stay tuned for the third and final episode... 👀