NHS trust continues roll-out of Node4’s clinical photographic services application

Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust (LGT) is a community-focused provider of local and acute care, delivering high-quality services to over one million people across the London boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley. Like many NHS Trusts, LGT struggled to balance the need for round-the-clock access to clinical photographic services with the regular working hours operated by its Medical Photography Team.

“The NHS did not, and still does not, have a national solution to this problem, and none of the existing applications we looked at met our requirements,” says Sally Foskett, Deputy Director of Content, Creative and Engagement at Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust. “These included Trust oversight and ownership of captured media, storage safety and consent to photography.”

“We selected Node4 because we liked their attitude and approach. The team spoke in terms we could understand and didn’t try to overwhelm us with a barrage of technical details.”

Julian Beeton, Head of Content and Channels at Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust.

Galerie met LGT’s brief in four key areas:

User independent: Galerie is not tied to a single user. If a clinician leaves the Trust or the NHS, the images stay within the application environment and do not leave with them.

Compliant with patient record retention: Galerie ensures the Trust stores electronic patient data in line with current guidelines and legislation.

Able to provide detailed image annotation capabilities: Galerie enables clinicians to annotate individual images when uploaded and allows further notes to be added by other colleagues at a later point.

Directly connected into the NHS spine: Galerie is the first application of its kind to directly connect clinical data from the NHS spine and store it in the Dataverse on the NHSmail Shared Tenant. This enables clinical staff to pull patient demographic data and create records.

“Galerie is a revolutionary application and a genuine first for the NHS,” Sally comments. “It looks and feels like an NHS app, so it should be an easy transition for users. There’s a simple sign-on process, and it’s very intuitive—no need to read an instruction manual.”

She continues: “It seems colleagues agree, as we have around 500 users. That’s almost twice as many as we expected by this point. Furthermore, in the last two months alone, we’ve photographed over 1,000 patients and captured nearly 3,300 images. Much of this is a result of considerable support and endorsement from senior leadership.”

“Galerie works on a phone, laptop or a smart device and looks identical in each instance. The only difference is that when Galerie launches on a phone, it also launches the camera so the user can take a photo,” Julian notes.

He continues: “However, the real innovation – and the most important component for us – is that photos never touch the user’s camera roll or photo gallery. They stay within the application environment, helping to protect against GDPR breaches. Galerie also restricts how photographs are shared via email, only allowing them to be forwarded to authorised accounts such as nhs.net emails and other approved DCB1596 compliant domains from partner organisations.”

Both colleagues are excited about Galerie’s current and expected deployments across the Trust: “Our community care and hospital teams often work together on patient treatments. Two of the most common collaborations are around foot health and tissue viability,” Sally explains.

“That’s not all. Our critical care teams use Galerie to create, annotate and send images that explain where minor adaptations are needed to help people live comfortably and with dignity in their homes. Beyond that, we can also see strong use cases for dermatology, burns, and plastic surgery teams. Outside the hospital, Ambulance crews could use Galerie to take pictures at the scene of an accident.”

Looking to the future, Sally and Julian think Galerie could set a new standard for clinical photographic service delivery across the NHS. “It feels truly innovative,” Julian reflects. “I think Galerie could be the catalyst for streamlining collaboration among healthcare teams and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations across our entire organisation.”

To read similar articles, check out our Technology channel.