In the second of a three-part series with Oxleas, Tom Whicher, James Woollard and Alison Furzer explore why digital change in mental health and community services is less a tech problem and more a people-and-process one.
PODCAST - THE DRDOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW
From Letters to Lifelines: A Conversation with Oxleas NHS Trust, Episode 2
What was covered?
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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