Solent NHS Trust picks Oracle Service Cloud to scale its Family Assist program

The National Health Service (NHS) provides government-funded affordable healthcare services to residents of the United Kingdom. These services include access to doctors, nurses, midwives, hospital treatments, emergency services, ambulance transport, and more.

Solent NHS Trust is an award-winning mental health, community, and learning disability Trust, delivering services across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight on the south coast of England. The organization needed to adapt service delivery for children and families as a direct rise in COVID-19 cases during the pandemic impacted the ability for healthcare professionals to connect with patients and provide standard health appointments and education.

Impacted services particularly affected pediatrician and OBGYN offices nationwide, where young parents and families were struggling to connect with their doctors and receive important information face to face. Solent NHS Trust turned to Oracle Service to create Family Assist Solent.

After a similar implementation of Oracle Service in the West Sussex region, Solent NHS Trust considered Oracle Service the best fit for helping the organization handle the wide breadth of knowledge in the Child and Family Services support network. The implementation would enable families to receive personalized care in an entirely new format via the Family Assist Solent portal.

Family Assist Solent is an online portal created to provide information about pregnancy, childcare, and other medical needs, ensuring that families have access to support and resources 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Oracle Service, part of the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience suite of applications, enabled scalable community interactions through an in-depth and medically approved knowledgebase, targeted email campaigns, and live chat with patients in need of answers. Most importantly, these resources were used to support healthcare professionals and patients when in-person interactions were difficult to schedule, preemptively allowing patients to access important and timely information.

Oracle’s knowledgebase empowered live chats and email correspondence for families, providing advice and guidance. This knowledgebase is constantly refreshed, with frequent queries updated and added, allowing families to have the most recent and relevant information at their fingertips.

Emails generated through Oracle Service created a strong layer of communication as well. Parents receive unique emails with content that is correlated to the gestational age or the age of the newborn to educate families on specific milestones and frequently asked questions throughout the child’s life. These email communications also inform parents on available online training sessions, such as prenatal classes, and notify the community about policy or service-level changes.

The Family Assist Solent portal had a tangible, positive impact on both patients and healthcare workers across Portsmouth, Southampton, and on the Isle of Wight. With changing restrictions, appointments were constantly fluctuating, and the number of people allowed into prenatal appointments and delivery rooms could shift. Using the Family Assist portal powered by Oracle Service, NHS providers were able to communicate with thousands of families, allowing them to stay up to date while simultaneously saving practitioners’ time that would have otherwise been filled with manual letters or phone calls. 

As for future enhancements, the live chat function on the Family Assist Solent portal will offer another avenue for abuse victims to report violence and receive support. Solent NHS Trust also plans to create a portal with Oracle Service to support emotional health and wellbeing in children and teenagers.