Academy of Fab NHS Stuff
On 26 November, Roland will find out if he has been announced as the overall winner in a celebration of ‘Fabness’ hosted by health writer and commentator, Roy Lilley in London.
Dr Roland is a previous winner of an Academy of Fab NHS Stuff award for his work creating ‘POPS’ (Paediatric Observation Priority Score); a scoring system used in the Paediatric Emergency Department which helps to improve detection of serious illness and aid in safe discharge for acutely ill children.
In conjunction with Dr Ffion Davies, clinical lead for the Paediatric Emergency Department at Leicester’s Hospitals, Dr Roland came up with the idea from scratch in 2008 when, as a trainee, he discovered that there were problems in communication when quantifying how sick the children were he was treating. This led to research into his project which has really developed over the last 3 to 4 years and is used across Leicester’s Hospitals. It has now been expanded to NHS Hospitals in Derby, Mansfield, Bristol, Gloucester and Reading.
Dr Roland explains: “I originally submitted POPS to the academy initially as a way to spread the word as I have the copyright but there is no licencing fee for it. I would like to see the system rolled out around the country and am extremely proud to see it being used by other NHS trusts.”
Social media has played a big role in promoting Dr Roland’s projects, having had his idea for POPS retweeted on Twitter over 100 times, and he has since developed an app on which the POPS system can be used. He is also one of the core team for NHS Change Day, which uses social media to share thousands of pledges of action.
More important for Dr Roland than winning the overall Academy winner title, will be meeting like-minded individuals at the Fab NHS Stuff event in London to exchange ideas. Commenting on the event in London, Dr Roland said: “I want it to draw a good analogy between the concept of NHS Change Day and the Academy in that it provides a great opportunity for similar people to share good ideas as it is a repository for good ideas.”
Sarah Remington, of IBM, has worked alongside Damian on POPS and said: “IBM, through our partnership with the Trust, worked with Dr Damian Roland on his work to develop POPS, providing an analytical capability to prove that the scores being recorded were an accurate representation of the patient’s outcome. This was a great opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of combining IBM’s experience in data and analytics with the Trust’s leading edge clinical thinking and one that we are developing as the critical mass of data continues to grow.”