Sue Rushbrook: Healthcare ICT Champion of the Year

Almost 400 guests turned out for this year’s BT e-Health Insider Awards in London, where the Healthcare ICT Champion of the Year was announced. Unfortunately, the winner, Sue Rushbrook, was away in Australia. Lyn Whitfield caught up with her back at work at York Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Appropriately for somebody who has helped to revolutionise her trust’s communications, Sue Rushbrook heard that she had won this year’s Healthcare ICT Champion of the Year award by text message.

Ms Rushbrook, head of systems and network services at York Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, was on holiday in Australia when the award was presented at the Millennium Mayfair Hotel in London during the BT e-Health Insider Awards.

But some of her 53-strong team kept her informed about the progress of the black-tie dinner, and let her know that she had become champion, a category of the awards sponsored by Microsoft and decided by the readers of the Microsoft NHS Resource Centre and E-Health Insider. “I got a text,” Ms Rushbrook says. “Australia is ten hours ahead, so it was like waking up to breaking news.”

The York communications revolution

In 2000, York Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust started on an information and communications technology strategy that has revolutionised the way it works.

It is now at the centre of a community of interest network (COIN) that extends to local GPs, clinics, health, mental health and elderly care centres and allows them to exchange messages, information and even test results and images quickly and efficiently.

The latest development is the introduction of Internet Protocol (or data enabled) phones to the main hospital. These are not only more flexible than traditional, fixed line phones or pagers, but allow users to pick up information from the hospital’s computer systems and share it with other teams and departments.

Ms Rushbrook’s nominee said she should win the Healthcare ICT Champion of the Year award both for creating: “a leading edge, patient-centred clinical application and community network across primary and secondary care” and for “selflessly pushing back the boundaries and resistance to change that such innovation often generates.”

The whole team

Back at work in York, Ms Rushbrook said she had initially been “embarrassed” to find that people thought so highly of her, but that she had also been “incredibly proud” to see her team’s work recognised. “There are 53 of us,” she says. “What we have delivered has been down to all of us.

“Since we won the award, people have phoned up and said how pleased they were. I think that as a team, we are so focused on getting on and getting things done that we tend to forget to tell people about the work we do. So it is important to get some recognition for that.”

Ms Rushbrook is a learning disabilities nurse by training and insists that she is “not an IT expert.” Her focus, she says, is always on what IT can do to support clinicians and to make care better and safer for patients. “You can have the sexiest IT in the world, but if people do not use it, it is no use,” she points out. However, she is still very pleased with the text. “If nothing else, it shows the technology works,” she notes.