Connect North East North Cumbria completes first 3,000 digital patient referrals
Following its launch in late 2024, the region’s digital patient referral platform, Connect NENC (North East and North Cumbria), has successfully achieved over 3,000 inter-hospital patient referrals. All NHS Foundation Trusts within the region can now refer patients using the platform.
Over 2,800 health professionals are using Connect NENC, for patients across several specialties.
This includes:
- Renal
- Renal transplantation
- Hepato-biliary-surgery
- Neurosurgery
- Spinal
- Intestinal failure
- Vascular surgery
- Burns
More specialties are launching on the platform every month, with cardiology one of the next areas of the project.
Staff from across the region are using Connect NENC to replace outdated, insecure and unreliable paper, email and telephone-based referrals between hospitals. The information shared on Connect NENC is more secure and auditable than ever before, making the care of complex patients safer and more efficient.
Kevin Joisce, consultant in emergency medicine and chief clinical information officer at South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, explained:
“Training new staff for using Connect NENC has been simple, with excellent training resources supporting our adoption. The software is easy to use and more efficient than previous systems, providing us with a consistent referral portal for interhospital referrals. This is a strong foundation to onboard additional specialties in the months to come.”
Euan Galloway, specialty trainee in Trauma and Orthopaedics, at Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust, added:
“Connect NENC is very easy to use and displays information in a way to simply interpret. I’d encourage departments that haven’t used an electronic referral system before to use Connect NENC. It makes a huge difference to the information you can provide at the point of referral and makes it easy to access all the information about your patients.”
“It is also easy to look back on the information on Connect NENC, rather than digging around through patient notes electronically or on paper.”
Connect NENC is improving communication between hospitals and specialist departments in the North East and North Cumbria. It securely speeds up referrals, supports clinical process reliability and gives a full audit trail for information governance.
To find out more, discover each Trust’s representative for the platform and view a range of resources, visit the Connect NENC website. You can also contact your named Trust representative, or email the project team (nuth.connectnenc@nhs.net) if you would like to know more about how your organisation is involved.
The platform is backed by national funding and is hosted by Newcastle Hospitals, on behalf the North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care System (ICS) and is powered by Patient Pass – which is used by multiple NHS hospitals in other regions.