Email dated 7 January 2015 from area team to practices
Dear Colleague,
As you will know the urgent care system is under considerable pressure at present with all services over-subscribed despite additional capacity being created wherever possible.
We know that this is being felt in Primary Care too.
One of the particular features in the last week has been an unusually high number of frail elderly patients with acute respiratory infections. Work is being undertaken today to provide the most up to date advice regarding therapeutic and diagnostic interventions for treatment of these cases in order to enable more patients to be treated in community settings. We are also advising the acute trusts to provide increased accessibility to respiratory consultant support including hot clinic access. We hope to publish this and to send it to you later today.
In addition we seek your support over the following:
•To take all actions to maximise capacity in the surgery, calling on any ‘off-duty’ staff as appropriate
•To seek to cancelling discretionary activities in order to free up more urgent care slots if there is excess demand, in line with Acute and Community Trusts
•To triage home visit requests as soon as possible and to prioritise early visiting for those who may need community services response or hospital assessment. This may allow same day discharge
•To keep us informed of any particular issues, including surges in demand, specific presentations that may be amenable to a review of protocol, staff sickness etc.
We will be in further conversation with the LMC about this to settle on the full range of appropriate and pragmatic actions that primary care can offer in these circumstances. Meanwhile any feedback or ideas are welcome.
Email dated 14 January 2015 from area team to practices
Subject: Urgent Care System Pressures
To all GP partners, Practice Managers in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire
Communication sent on behalf of Linda Prosser, Director of Commissioning, NHS England, BNSSSG Area team
Dear Colleague,
I want to correspond with all of you again in response to your comments and suggestions following my e mail of last week regarding Urgent Care system pressures. I also want to thank you for taking the time to respond to me, not surprisingly there were many impassioned views expressed. Whilst I may not fully appreciate exactly what it is like to be under the pressure that you all feel, I do not doubt it; your experiences are expressed to us consistently.
The fact that the system ensured that patients were managed safely and effectively of the holiday period is due in a large part to the number of additional patients that you have seen and hours that most of you have put in. You will appreciate from your peers working in other parts of the system, including acute trusts that their pressures have been intense too, such that any disappointments that they experienced in Primary Care responsiveness demanded highlighting.
Unfortunately only a generic approach was pragmatic, which I know was galling for those of you who really were pulling out all of the stops. Of course we never really know how many patients who are attending A&E and saying that they could not get in to their GP have really actually tried, but we want to have been able to accommodate them if at all possible where they did.
I think though that uncomfortable as this may have been, we have gleaned some suggestions and priorities for development which we will consider in detail and take up where possible. These include:
- The need for a rigorous system wide analysis of this Christmas & New Year, including quantification where possible of ‘inappropriate’ demand, effect of NHS 111 etc.
- Review of Community capacity and responsiveness including rapid response and social care – to ‘never say no’
- Giving practices the resource to employ such community services and set their culture
- Supporting GP’s in their management of high risk individuals around the clock
- NHS commissioned nursing home capacity
- Mechanisms to access funds as appropriate for costs of services over and above the norm, including additional winter clinics
- More public communications re the purpose of A&E (national), also localised messages
- Reduce the burden of QOF and prescribing schemes on practices
- Planning for this and other post long holiday periods to suspend planned care (such as LTC clinics, contraception etc.) as far as can be caught up in future weeks, to focus resources on urgent care
- Suspension of training / study leave in this period
- Peripatetic day time home visiting service (Winter only or all year?)
- Creation of a pool or bank of Primary Care staff, across the whole multi-disciplinary team that can be called upon at peak times, across groups of practices. This can include part time nursing staff
- Enabling some tasks to be undertaken by ‘home-workers’ such as part-time GP’s processing incoming letters, results etc
- The sharing of a range of resources across practices
- Roll out primary care pressure reporting on the Almanac system
- Increase clinical input in to NHS 111; triage is best done by experienced clinicians
- Simplify the profusion of Care Plans
We will all be working now to pick up these issues and your local CCG meetings will be a place for further discussion. However if this doesn’t feel like sufficient attention we can arrange specific events, though we will do so only with care because of the need for a good return in taking up peoples valuable time. I wonder whether the reality though is that we are at the threshold of seeking more strategic and further reaching solutions to Primary Care sustainability, such as those trailed in NHS England’s Five Year Forward View, relating to new forms of organisation. This will definitely need constructive time together.
Thank you for your continued commitment to your patients, which we fully recognise, whist we work together to seek creative ways forward to sustain effective services whilst protecting the whole workforce.
Kind regards,
Linda
Linda Prosser
Director of Commissioning
NHS England: Bristol, North Somerset, Somerset and South Gloucestershire Area Team
