North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust (NCIC) is a health trust that provides hospital and community health services to around half million people in Cumbria. They deliver more than 70 services over 15 locations.
They work along side partners and the community to provide health and care for patients though Acute hospitals, Community Hospitals and Clinics.
The wider information Governance Team at NCIC handle information governance queries and oversee a range of information governance tasks. There is an Information Rights Team that has responsibility for handling more than 2500 requests for copies of information including over 700 Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.
The challenge
The Information Rights Team manager wanted to make sure the staff were fully compliant with the FOI legislation and able to consistently apply the relevant exemptions and in what scenario.
There is also an organisation requirement to have a training needs analysis for each member of staff. This leads to the need was to provide relevant assurance to managers that the staff were competent in their role with the necessary skills and training, to compliment spot check audits on cases and supervision / support arrangements in place.
The solution
An in-depth training programme that provided the team with…
- a refresher for FOI basics
- an advanced training session that delved into the exemptions and processes.
Discussing this with the managers, Debbie from DTIG was able to devise a two-day interactive programme that was tailored to their needs, could be delivered in a timely and convenient manner and met their budget.
The managers developed a business case which identified the need for this training to enable compliance with the legislation and determined that “it is imperative that we meet the laid out standards in the legislation, linked to Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT) which we are independently audited upon each year.”.
Strategically
The wider IG team has a vision “to enable high quality care by facilitating the ethical, legal, effective and appropriate use of and access to accurate and reliable information that maintains confidentiality, integrity and availability”.
For the Information Rights Team they have strategic objectives to respond to FOI requests within the legislative timescale of 20 days. They initially acknowledge the request within 2 days. The performance is monitored to ensure all requests are answered on time and forms part of a strategic information governance report.
The results
As a result of the training, the staff and managers identified the following results from the training programme:
- Increased confidence in staff ability to respond to requests.
- Increased confidence in the ability to provide advice and support to our stakeholders who we ask the information from on whether an exemption would apply but pushing the ethos of disclosure as first principle.
- Increased compliance with requests. We have seen improvements in the last two months which in part will be down the training the staff have received.
Why did you choose DTIG?
“An easy decision for us for a number of reasons:
- Debbie’s skills as a trainer are well developed and she is able to translate complex tasks into easily understandable examples that can be applied.
- Value for money in terms of the cost of the course and receiving high quality training materials, tutorials as well with follow up advice and support. This includes free templates that we have adapted into our processes.
- DTIG understands the operational pressures and uses this experience to support us.
- Flexibility – can offer the training face to face or our preference this time via MS teams.”
Yvonne Salkeld, North Cumbria Integrated Care Trust