Our Work

“It’s been a joy working with Tara and Jenny as they’ve helped us build local confidence in the digital home care model and achieve greater patient uptake. 

Their deep knowledge and understanding of the NHS, coupled with a passion for a home based model of care - supported by great tech - is a fantastic combination to drive adoption, enabling many more patients to benefit.” 

Martin Ratz

Founder, Doccla 

About Doccla is Europe's leading virtual hospital and is the only tech-enabled virtual ward provider working in the NHS that is CQC accredited and provides the option of a clinical service to its customers. Its strap-line is “no hassle virtual wards” and while the NHS in the UK is its primary customer base, given the range and size of contracts held, it also operates across 10 European countries. 

Doccla is the result of a very personal experience, established when its founder, Martin Ratz suffered a heart attack at a young age. His experience of a hospital stay and discharge without any monitoring seemed to him ridiculous when new technology was available. There was a need for someone to help patients when they need it most, using the latest technology to bring them closer to their carers whilst being able to recover safely at home. Today Doccla is a large team of dedicated colleagues working across Europe to deliver virtual wards. With diverse backgrounds but united in their passion to change how healthcare is delivered for patients, today and tomorrow.

Context Doccla has achieved strong success across the UK health market place and is now the leading player across England, Ireland and Wales as well as number of new contracts in European countries including Italy and Germany. To date, they have never lost a client. 

Project Our input has been to develop relationships with sites to help build confidence in the new pathways of care, and a home based care model, as well as developing a method for increasing patient uptake more rapidly, that the delivery teams are taking up. This has been based on our own experience working across the NHS for several decades augmented by a hands-on approach to implementation supporting including visits to services and sessions with front line clinicians. We are also providing advisory input into what the future of digital home care could look like, well beyond virtual wards. This includes achieving Health Hubs for long term conditions such as COPD, enabling people living with progressive LTCs to spend more time at home and less in hospital. 

Team involved: Tara Donnelly and Jenny Thomas - from March 2023 onwards, additionally Natasha Phillips from Sept 2023 - July 2024. 

“I commissioned Tara and Lesley to complete a swift but important piece of work and was delighted with the quality of outcome, their ability to engage positively with staff and their wider knowledge of the subject matter. I would definitely recommend them for similar pieces of work which require sound judgement and the ability to work with others quickly, but for a short piece of time, to deliver real results.”

David Probert

Chief Executive, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust 

About UCLH is one of the leading Trusts in the country and is currently rated as the top acute trust by patients for their care* as well as by staff, as the number one trust to work for**. Situated in the heart of London, it is one of the largest NHS trusts in the United Kingdom with a £1.5 billion annual turnover and provides acute and specialist services across the several hospitals in the group which include the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at Queen Square, the UCH Macmillan Cancer Centre and, most recently, the UCH Grafton Way Building which houses one of only two Proton Beam Therapy centres in the UK. It has a One Team ethos and its values are Safety, Kindness, Teamwork and Improving and it strives to be world class in patient care, education and research.  

*From the CQC inpatient survey published August 2024 

**This is according to responses to the most recent staff survey on “I would recommend my organisation as a place to work” - out of all acute and community NHS Trusts in England. 

Context UCLH is highly digitised following a successful implementation of EPIC across its hospitals in 2019 and has since developed novel aspects such as a Digital Innovation Hub, to build on these strong foundations. 

Project Digital Care was asked to undertake a rapid review of the digital health structures, working with the UCLH team, and make recommendations to help ensure that they were well set up for the future. This included completing 25 senior stakeholder interviews to feed in a range of perspectives into the review.

Team involved: Tara Donnelly and Lesley Soden, June and July 2023 

“Thanks to partnering with the Digital Care team, we have been able to build consensus for complex change programmes across organisations, including clinical and technical teams, engage with a range of suppliers to understand our market options and maintain momentum.”

Susan Sinclair

Managing Director, RM Partners - West London Cancer Alliance 

About RM Partners is one of 21 Cancer Alliances established by NHS England to lead on the delivery of the cancer care recommendations in the NHS Long Term Plan. Its mission is to achieve world class cancer care outcomes and experience for its population in West London, working with its nine NHS acute trust members across two Integrated Care Systems - North West London ICS and South West London ICS - as well as third sector and voluntary organisations, supporting four million people living across West London. It is hosted by the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust. 

Context Increasingly, Cancer Alliances are using technology to improve care to people living with cancer, and RM Partners is no exception with a large programme of activity including innovation funding going out to hospital trusts in south west and north west London, and a series of major complex change programmes underpinned by digital. 

Project Digital Care is providing Digital Support to RM Partners to help deliver its ambitious digital programme. This covers programme management, implementation support and specialist digital expertise. 

Team involved: Pip Hodgson and Tara Donnelly, from May 2023 - June 2024

Sam Roberts

Chief Executive, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence

About NICE is the leading authority on evidenced based care in healthcare within the UK. It helps practitioners and commissioners get the best care to patients, fast, while ensuring value to the taxpayer. NICE evaluate all types of new technologies for NHS use, considering clinical effectiveness and value for money. the also produce useful and usable guidance, helping health and care practitioners deliver the best care.

Context NICE had undertaken considerable work in the digital home care and virtual ward space and wanted to ensure that, in the spirit of increasing the usefulness and usability of its advice, it was presented in the most accessible way as possible to practitioners and commissioners alike. 

Project Digital Care worked with the NICE team to design a section of the NICE website to present the work on guidelines and best practice in a usable format. This included drafting precis of key documents, editing to improve clarity, identifying clinicians to contribute to case studies and testing iterations with front-line clinical practitioners. Tara also spoke at the NICE 2023 Conference to launch the site and the new guidance.  

https://www.nice.org.uk/about/what-we-do/supporting-the-health-and-care-system-to-implement-virtual-wards

Team involved: Breid O'Brien and Tara Donnelly, August to November 2023

"Tara and the team brought a dynamic to this new venture that we couldn't have achieved on our own. Their expertise in business case writing was so critical in helping our delegates develop the key skills they need to make positive changes in the NHS, and to hear from Digital Care's experts about the accomplishments they have achieved in digital health change-making, both at a strategic thinking level and in terms of sheer grit and determination, helped give the course the confidence-boosting element that was needed, to generate a mass momentum effect."  

Jimmy Endicott

Programme Director, Digital Woundcare Leadership Programme 

About The Digital Woundcare Leadership Programme is a funded course for aspiring digital career nurses working in woundcare in community settings - delivered in partnership with change experts and industry. Delegates are  natural leaders in woundcare nursing and have an ambition to introduce specific digital innovations. This four-day face-to-face learning programme helps participants develop the skills to bring about successful digital change in community health provider organisations. Delegates complete the course with the skills to better implement a digital change project and a practical plan for initiating change.

Context Chronic wound care costs the NHS £8.3b every year – more than obesity and smoking related diseases put together. It’s the highest NHS spend after cancer and diabetes care. Much of the cost (80%) is met in community care and there is significant wastage of resources resulting from unwarranted variation in care and under use of best practice, underpinned by poor quality and inconsistent data about wound caseloads on which to base informed clinical decisions. These are the findings of the health economist Julian Guest’s landmark national “Burden of Wounds” studies. Meanwhile, chronic wound prevalence is increasing due to the growing aging population - so the problem is getting worse. The National Wound Care Strategy Programme recommends digital change to improve data and information in support of clinical decision making and quality improvement in chronic wound management. The course aims to support delegates in achieving success in bringing their digital change projects to life.

Project Our input has been to develop a workshop around improving business case writing skills for clinicians to help them successfully win support for their digital project proposals within their own organisations. We also gave delegates insights from accomplished digital practitioners who could advise on how delegates can better navigate governance processes in their own organisations and strategically build a support network which would help drive their ideas through to success - as well as having the key combination of confidence and analytical 

thinking that is often required of digital change leaders.

Team involved: Lesley Soden and Pip Hodgson, May and June 2024