Angela Whiteley
2020 Bio: Angela is a Specialist Speech and Language Therapist and digital transformation champion for children’s therapies. She is responsible for supporting colleagues in her Directorate with utilising technology to develop ideas into practical solutions to support delivery of patient care from a clinical and administrative perspective. Angela has pioneered teletherapy service provision for her team and shared the learning. She chair her team’s innovation meetings and is a member of a number of steering and working groups in the organisation responsible for implementing the Trust’s digital strategy.
Digital Pioneer Fellowship project summary: The first project that Angela is looking to develop is to investigate how to transfer and scale the teletherapy model of care from their trial school to at least five schools across the borough. This will involve working with and through other therapy and educational colleagues. It will also require Angela continuing to work with her IT colleagues. The learning from this would then inform a wider roll out to potentially 50+ schools in the borough. The second project will be looking at how her team can use video consultation (AttendAnywhere and Microsoft Teams) to transfer their drop-in/walk-in service for parents and schools that is currently clinic/school based service to a remote version that replicates the ethos of no appointment necessary. Angela is also very interested in looking for new ideas and opportunities on how the digital transformation project can improve their clinical service.
Estimated number of patients / staff impacted by the project: It involves five Health Centres and five Schools (six to 10 staff approximately), serving a borough wide population of 303,536. The impact involves shifting of significant levels of activity from face-to-face to video consultation, a reduction in waiting times, ensuring a resilient model of service delivery is developed, improved patient experience, empowerment of parents/carers/educators to support children and young people, and changing the therapeutic relationship from the therapist as a teacher to the therapist as a coach.
Goal(s) for the programme: To develop effective, safe and resilient therapy interventions and assessments using technology to reduce health inequalities and improve outcomes.