NHS Southern Derbyshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has adopted Crowdicity’s cloud-based crowdsourcing software to engage its community of patients, GPs, nurses, consultants, careers, local government authorities, stakeholders and partners. The project has been launched to drive innovation and maintain the CCG’s focus on safeguarding patient care.

NHS Southern Derbyshire CCG brings together the combined expertise of 56 local GP practices to commission health services on behalf of over 525,000 patients. The CCG was looking for an innovative way to tap into the collective knowledge of its community to gather insights and ideas, with a view to continuously improving the health and wellbeing of the people of Southern Derbyshire.

Dr Sheila Newport, Chair of Southern Derbyshire Clinical Commissioning Group and Chair of Derbyshire Innovation Partnership, said: “With such a huge network of professionals spread throughout our organisation, we needed a central portal to connect everyone easily and effectively – encouraging the sharing of ideas and wider innovation throughout the Group. We want to encourage people to make their own changes – while also taking on-board suggestions that can work throughout the entire organisation.

“As with many big organisations, there is a lot of competition for time within our Group. This new platform will help us reduce the reliance on physical meetings and also encourage people who perhaps would not normally come across one another to chat, engage and share ideas. From training staff on the prevention of pressure ulcers to care for acute kidney injuries – we have countless ideas for this platform and expect it to have a great impact on the effectiveness and innovation of the organisation as a whole.”

Marie Peach-Geraghty, Account Manager at Crowdicity, added: “The Crowdicity platform is delivering successful outcomes in the healthcare sector, predominantly because its features naturally suit the medical profession. By setting challenges centrally, and bringing colleagues together to address them from offices miles apart and on different shift patterns, meaningful and productive collaboration can now be achieved simply and remotely – without the need for expensive and time consuming face-to-face meetings.

“It’s essential to the wellbeing of our nation that healthcare organisations continue to innovate in order to drive continuous improvement in patient care. It’s fantastic to see so many of them turning to crowdsourcing to ensure that the NHS taps into the skills and ideas that the workforce has to offer.”

For more information about Crowdicity and its services, please visit http://crowdicity.com