Powys midwives set up IT wizard

Powys Health Board in Wales is piloting the Myrddin patient administration system for community midwives.

The health board went live with the maternity module of the PAS earlier this month. It gives midwives remote access to the system, which allows them to review and update mother and baby details on laptops during home visits.

Cate Langley, Powys head of midwifery and sexual health, told EHI that the health board would evaluate the pilot to see how the maternity module can benefit clinical care.

“The 30 midwives who are using the Myrddin maternity module in Powys are finding it really useful so far and the health board will be further evaluating its use in a few months’ time,” she said.

Once a baby has been born, it is given an NHS Number, which is generated within Myrddin, and a full care episode is recorded for both the mother and baby.

The Myrddin PAS in use at most health boards in Wales and was developed by the NHS Wales Informatics Service.

NWIS has created several national systems for the country’s health boards. The latest addition is a bed data reporting tool that shows the occupancy rate of hospital beds in Wales at 9am every morning.

Health board staff who are responsible for adding this data can log into the system and submit information about the major hospitals. The data is displayed in a dashboard format and accessible to any staff who have access to the NHS Wales intranet.

The system has been in use since July 2013 and is used by the Welsh government for planning and monitoring.

Roger Perks, head of operation at the department of health, Welsh Government, said the tool made up a part of the unscheduled care dashboard, which has been in use for several years.

“It helps us to get a real-time overview of capacity and occupancy, and helps towards out aim of providing quality care,” said Perks.