Empowering Community Nursing Through eCommunity
Summary
North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust has improved the way community nursing is planned, delivered and evidenced through the implementation of RLDatix’s eCommunity platform. Covering a large rural geography, the Trust needed better visibility, safer lone working and reliable reporting to support staff and patients. eCommunity provides real-time scheduling, safety tools, route optimisation and data-driven reporting. This has strengthened workforce planning, improved staff confidence and created safer, timelier care for patients while reducing inefficiencies across community services.
The Challenge
Community nurses work across vast, rural areas, often alone, without real-time visibility or safety support. Before eCommunity, staff rostering was manual and fragmented, making it difficult to allocate work fairly or respond quickly to changes. The Trust could not easily track deferred visits, missed care or open treatments, leaving little evidence to demonstrate workload and service impact. This limited the ability to plan proactively and created a constant cycle of reacting to issues, affecting staff safety, wellbeing and patient care.
The Solution
The Trust introduced eCommunity, chosen for its fit with community care. The implementation involved collaboration with RLDatix, starting with a pilot and refining the system based on staff feedback. Key features included real-time scheduling and workforce visibility, lone worker check-in and check-out tools, route optimisation, and integration with EMIS and Allocate Optima. Training and change management supported the rollout, helping staff adapt and use data to inform workforce planning and service delivery. The approach has shifted the culture from reactive firefighting to proactive decision-making.
Results & Next Steps
In the past 18 months, the Trust has seen measurable improvements in safety, efficiency and care quality. Lone worker features now provide real-time reassurance. Visibility of workload and sickness enables dynamic redeployment across teams. Deferred visits and missed care are tracked, reducing risk to patients. Route optimisation has cut travel time and improved efficiency. Data is now used to evidence activity to commissioners and inform service planning. Following successful pilots, eCommunity is being expanded across more community services, with potential for use by therapy teams, specialist nurses and other non-acute providers.
