Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Healthy Child Catch-Up, the SchoolScreener® newsletter. It’s our aim to share news and updates of relevance to anyone working in child health in the school environment. Sometimes there’ll be a common theme running through the articles, such as with this issue, releasing more time to care for children. Other months will have a more eclectic mix.
We’ll post new issues every month, in the last week of the month. For each issue, a short summary will be emailed and you can access the full story via links.
For February we have 3 articles, all related to saving time in your day-to-day duties. Cutting out the ‘tedious but needed’ bits, in other words.
Automatic PDS Lookup Saves 521 Working Days
It’s long been an Administrator’s chore to find and add NHS numbers to records after screening tests. Now we’ve made it easier and much quicker. Using NHS Digital’s PDS, NHS numbers can be added in a jiffy. There’s more information here.
We’ve been rolling this out to clients, at no extra charge, since January. By mid-February we’d seen over 250,000 NHS number look-ups.
We estimate that saves around a minute for each lookup, and quite a few transposing errors, too. 250,000 minutes, that’s over 4,167 hours. more than 521 working days of NHS admin time saved in the first month!
Instant Parent Messaging: Better, Faster, Paperless
Most of our clients are now using the SchoolScreener ParentPortal as they head towards paper-light service delivery.
The parent messaging service aspect of this is proving to be a major time-saver.
No more print costs; no more angst over whether the messages reach home. Rapid electronic messaging saves the service time and money.
Now parents can be alerted via email, to log into the ParentPortal. Once there, they can see secure communications. Simple text messages, or with attachments, PDF information leaflets, links to videos. Messages can be individual, relating to a specific child or group communications sent to a cohort.
Save 60 Minutes of Nurse Time... Per Child
One service that uses SchoolScreener® Health Needs, Compass in Warwickshire, estimate that they save up to 60 minutes of school nurse time per child, compared with paper surveys. That’s what we mean by ‘Release Time to Care‘.
Read more about our work with Compass. Also, they’ve shared their experience by creating questionnaires that we’re able to share with other organisations using the online Health Needs app.
At Thomson Screening we’re passionate about child health in school. Used over 2 million times, SchoolScreener apps have played a vital role for over 10 years. Find out more or contact us, any time.
