February has been a busy month as we have been to visit 12 practices across Sunderland, two locality meetings, the GP Group and the diabetes network, all to engage and discuss the plans for Enhanced Primary Care with general practice staff.
Plans are now progressing at pace, and we are currently recruiting a project manager to implement the Map of Medicine tool. As a reminder, Map is a clinical reference tool which will be a centrally updated to contain local and national referral and treatment guidelines, and available at the click of a button on each clinician’s desktop.
The new project manager will work alongside Tracey Teasdale as a dedicated Map resource, ensuring Tracey is able to continue to develop other exciting initiatives. For example, through the practice visits we have found several practices keen to work as part of a locality hub and spoke service. Such services could cover initiating insulin in type 2 diabetic patients on behalf of neighbouring practices, or performing 24 hour ECGs, all of which would be funded through the Alliance’s participation in the Vanguard project.
The diabetes audit and review package, alluded to last month, is ready to go, but we have made a decision, following practices’ feedback, to hold this for launch after the end of the QOF year. Expect to see further information at the end of March.
Finally, NHS England visited Sunderland on 8th February for a review of all of the city’s Vanguard workstreams. The Alliance, along with other key partners, presented on progress to date, and, while formal feedback has not yet been received, the New Models of Care team were very complimentary about many of the city’s achievements in the past twelve months. A lot of interest was expressed in our Enhanced Primary Care programme, and our developing models of primary care at scale, and we look forward to being able to advise them of further key accomplishments over the next few months.
As always, if you have any questions regarding the Enhanced Primary Care programme, or if you want to get more involved please contact Tracey on [email protected].