The pandemic resulted in midwives no longer worked within general practices, which resulted in midwives having access to patients’ health records. This caused a high clinical and safeguarding risk, as midwives were unable to access relevant medical data whilst working in the community.

The three acute Digital midwives worked collaboratively with the LMNS ICB Digital Team and the Norfolk and Waveney Local Medical Committee (LMC) to address and mitigate the risks.

The agreed, action to mitigate the risk was to provide midwives with clinical record viewer access via SystmOne using authenticated smart cards.

Work has progressed on the ‘Shared Care Health Record’ and has therefore, supersedes the original project however, the process was set up across all three acute trusts and had varying success.

Future ambitions for this work include allocating midwives with read and write access to patient records enabling them to access and make essential amendments whilst out in the community.