Wednesday 10 April 2013

Hospital doctors contacting GPs...

The following storify is from a conversation earlier today. Many hospital doctors talk about finding it hard to contact primary care, just as GPs find it hard to get in touch with them. I'm posting it here so that you might share some of your solutions.

5 comments:

  1. The solution to this problem lies about a century in the future. Hospital doctors have one hell of a problem contacting GPs (they never seemed to have a problem contacting me though, when I was a GP. But when I tried getting hold of a hospitaln consultant it was even worse. Mind - I did once, to my great satisfaction, manage to get an A&E consultant out of her bed at 3.00 a.m. to ask her why, in her department, patients were having to wait in excess of 4 hours for attention (this concerning a patient with a fractured wrist who was told to go home and contact his GP because of the long wait)

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    1. You now win a virtual prize of your choice for bing the first person to comment on 3 of my posts in the past month!

      That's a great story. Let's hope it really isn't a century until a solution materialises.

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  2. The solutions to this issue aren't only about applying the GP contract properly, but also relate to the technologies used between different providers inc primary care, and the underlying factor of small independent practices. In some areas there are electronic messaging systems for results that go into the practice system and provide alerts to the GP. In addition, the development of interoperable / shared record systems across providers including primary care allow rapid access to up date clinical information. Such a system is now being rolled out in Oxfordshire, and Bristol / Avon is also moving ahead with interoperability between providers.
    The bigger issue this question begs is about why a practice might feel it needs to close for an afternoon. My guess is that this is more common with smaller practices, and the general trend towards more federated or multi-branch practices will help. Bigger, or federated, practices using common / interoperable GP clinical systems that connect up with other clinical systems would all deliver more effective communication of crucial information.

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    1. In this case the issue was a test result that originated in secondary care. Are there systems to communicate these directly to GPs?

      The 'spine' should have addressed the issue described here but as Phil pointed out it might not have been synced properly.

      Why do GP practices close for an afternoon? I don't think that the practice I work in ever does.

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    2. Yes - example is the ICE system, which integrates with Emis and other GP systems - http://www.emis-online.com/partner-programme/product/ice-desktop

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