March – Easter and the end of the financial year has galvanised all our efforts this month into ensuring our plans are ready to make a start in April.
It’s been a short month so it’s been frenetic, but I for one am looking forward to a welcome break over Easter to re-charge the batteries.
We have successfully recruited a Map of Medicine Project Manager who will be joining us after the Easter break, Mark Beadling will be a welcome addition to the team as he brings a wealth of experience in our clinical IT systems, where I have a clinical background so I focus much more on the front end pathways and patient journey. Once Mark is in role work starts in earnest bringing Map of Medicine to life with pathways needing to be reviewed and integrated into the system before the Go Live date which will hopefully be around September. More news will come regarding training etc via TITO and the locality meetings.
We have been busy contracting with suppliers of the technology which will enable us to increase our opportunistic screening and find our missing AF patients who are at risk of stroke but not on anti-coagulant therapy. In April / May I will be coming out to the localities / practices to launch the opportunistic screening project and to talk you through the equipment and how to use it. It’s incredibly straightforward and feedback from other areas using it has been really positive. We are also aiming to have the GP access 24-72 hour ECG service up and running in hubs from May. I will update more on that next month.
Following a discussion in one of the localities I am also starting to really look at the data on the care home patients and how far and wide their GP surgeries are currently spread. I met a practice last week who have 74 patients in 22 different care homes across the city. Clearly the impact for them and resources required to sustain that situation are significant. We will embark on a project to re-align care homes where possible and with patient consent to a local GP surgery. This work was undertaken a few years ago in the Coalfields and now those GP’s report great advantages to having undertaken that re-alignment.
There’ll be further information on these schemes and more at the April TITO.
As always if you have questions regarding enhanced primary care please contact me: [email protected]