healthcare news Archives - Page 3 of 4

Papering over the cracks?

The Government has announced a funding boost of £500m to help to relieve pressure on the worst hit A&E departments. Statistics have revealed that one million more people attended A&E in the last year compared with three years ago and this, particularly over the winter, has resulted in a virtual melt down of some services.

The funding is aimed at helping hospitals to prepare for the forthcoming winter and is designed to reduce or eliminate the “pinch points” which can so badly affect A&E services. This should enable A&E patients to be treated promptly and provide alternate care pathways for those who currently see A&E as their only care option.

Hospitals which have been identified as being most affected have been invited to submit their proposals for funding. These proposals may involve Accident and Emergency departments directly but could also cover areas such as taking steps to minimise hospital admissions from care homes by providing local specialists, increasing hours at walk in centres or pharmacies or increased social care provision or the provision of more services away from hospitals.

In announcing the proposals the Prime Minister, David Cameron, said:

“The additional funding will go to hospitals where the pressure will be greatest, with a focus on practical measures that relieve pinch points in local services. By acting now, we can ensure doctors, nurses and NHS staff have the support they need and patients are not left facing excessive waits for treatment.

Whether this new measure will be successful in reducing winter waiting times will be a matter for the future but it has to be said that it has not received universal acclaim. The Alzheimer’s Society commented that “while today’s proposals could bring short term benefits, they will do little more than paper over the cracks,” and their comments were echoed by the BMA and others.

However, this is but one stage in an overall plan to provide continuity of care within the community, thereby reducing the pressure on hospitals. This includes a £3.8 billion fund to “focus on joining up services, so that health and care services work more closely together, keeping people healthier and treating them closer to home.”

In the long term this will provide opportunities for health practitioners such as physiotherapists and osteopaths to provide higher levels of care outside the mainstream hospital system. Those health care providers who have streamlined their services to maximise patient treatment time are in a strong position to benefit from this new health care ethos and to provide increasing levels of care continuity to their patients and the community in which they serve.

The Olympic legacy – one year on

On 21^st July sporting stars joined 15,000 runners to commemorate the anniversary of London 2012. With 2,500 adults and children racing round a family friendly 1.5 mile track, the remainder of the runners tackled a 5 mile course which wound around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

The National Lottery anniversary run was started by Sir Chris Hoy whilst athletes such as Victoria Pendleton and Paula Radcliffe joined the mass runners cheered on by family and friends. Finishing on the Olympic athletics track itself every runner who completed the course created their own special memory to treasure and add to the host of positive memories of the Olympic and Paralympic games.

The run is not the only way in which the games are being remembered. As part of the legacy programme sports clubs across the UK have offered and continue to offer special taster days and extra coaching to tempt people to take up or return to sport. The ongoing success of these programmes can be seen with increased numbers of cyclists on our roads and a heightened level of competition enjoyed at many sporting events.

But the legacy is not just about competition and the true legacy can be seen in those who are enjoying sport as a means of keeping fit. Inevitably this results in an increase of sporting injuries as old joints and muscles are coaxed into working that little bit harder and those who once gaily set off on a run without any preparation discover the importance of stretching.

For physiotherapists, chiropractors, osteopaths and other health practitioners the sporting revival therefore carries the potential for an increased caseload. But in order to benefit from this legacy potential, health practitioners may have to optimise their working time. One option available is for activities such as diary management, client notes management and appointment reminder calls to be outsourced to a virtual assistant service. With phones diverted and day to day practice management outsourced, health professionals can concentrate on maximising patient treatment times.

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is due to open its doors fully for business in the Spring of 2014. When it does it will offer many more opportunities to participate in sport. In the meantime there are lots of special events, taster sessions and trials taking place across the country for those whose appetite has been whetted for Rio 2016 and beyond or who just want to take up the challenge and get a little fitter.

I just called with a reminder

There are good calls and bad calls; calls you treasure, calls you feel are unwanted intrusions into your day and calls you will remember for the rest of your life. But from time to time a call arrives which is so useful that you are simply pleased to receive it.

We refer here to appointment reminders, those simple texts or automated calls which remind you that your doctor/dentist/hair or other appointment is due. They don’t take much but can play a huge part in ensuring that you do arrive at your appointment on time, thereby reducing the vast numbers of no-shows which daily cost health practitioners both time and money.

One recent convert to the benefits of automated reminders is the Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. From the start of August, those with outpatient appointments will receive a communication a week before their appointment date, asking them to confirm, cancel or rearrange. The Trust hopes that this will make a dent in the 39,871 appointments which were missed in the last year.

In fact the trust has calculated that every no-show costs an average of £108 which means that the Trust spent over £4 million last year in dealing with those who failed to turn up for appointments, money which would have been better spent on providing treatment. In announcing the new service David Moss, deputy general manager for outpatients, Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “By making sure all of our appointments are used, we can see more patients and patients will be seen sooner.”

But it is not just hospitals and NHS trusts which are affected by no-shows. All health practitioners are similarly affected and for those providing direct-pay services such as physiotherapy, a no-show not only means another patient could have been treated, it also equates to a direct loss of income.

Contacting patients to remind them of their appointments can also take time out from that available for treatments. One solution is to use a virtual assistant service to both make appointments and to send out reminders. With diary management online the health practitioner can quickly view their upcoming appointments but still be free to maximise patient time. Add in a patient notes service and even more time can be found for the practitioner to do what they do best, treating patients.

Workout at work day

Workout at work day 2013 has been hailed as a success with hundreds of events taking place across the UK. From exercise classes and yoga to simple walks in the fresh air, the businesses taking part have all stepped up to recognise the benefits which they can gain through encouraging employees to exercise.

Organised by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP), the day was billed as an opportunity for businesses to work with employees to develop a healthy lifestyle. The CSP encouraged businesses to call in a local physiotherapist to show how simple changes in exercise or working patterns can make a huge difference to staff wellbeing and attendance levels.

According to the CSP, poor work habits such as sitting for long periods, not taking breaks and working late can all increase the risk of musculoskeletal disorders and stress, depression or anxiety. This in turn can contribute to the millions of days lost every year due to employer-related ill health. Taking time out to encourage employees to work fitter can therefore make a huge difference to a business. In fact a report by The Work Foundation revealed that for every £1 spent on wellbeing initiatives, businesses gained £3 of benefits.

For physiotherapists too, this day brings the opportunity to make contact with businesses in their area. This brings multiple opportunities for closer working relationships including the possibility of arranging contracted physiotherapy and advice sessions for businesses. This type of service is already widely offered by other health-related practitioners such as chiropractors and is generally appreciated by employers and employees alike.

Of course this does raise the question of client contact when out of the office. There is no point in arranging a weekly session at a local business if this means other clients can’t make appointments. The solution is to use the services of a virtual assistant. When you can’t answer the phone the virtual assistant can step in, taking calls and messages and arranging appointments. This means that your business is never out of touch even if you are. Virtual assistants can also send out appointment reminders and organise patient records.

Workout at work day is a great reminder of the way in which health services can reach out and help people to achieve a better work/life balance. Using a virtual assistant service to help when out of contact also means that health practitioners themselves can balance their work, home and client needs.

Designing care pathways around patients’ needs

A report by The King’s Fund has recommended that local organisations be given the freedom to prioritise quality patient care under the supervision of NHS boards. Entitled “Patient-centred leadership” the report acts as a follow-up to the Francis inquiry.

One of the central themes of the report relates to the need to move away from externally imposed targets and towards a culture which puts patient-care at the centre of the NHS. Commenting on the report the NHS Confederation chief operating officer Matt Tee said: “It is very worrying that such a significant proportion of respondents to the King’s Fund survey think the NHS does not sufficiently prioritise quality of care.”

The president of the Royal College of Physicians, Sir Richard Thompson, backed the report but highlighted the way in which technology can play its part in aiding, or hampering, a physician’s attempt to provide quality care. A report on the national health executive website quotes Sir Richard as saying that “Clinicians desperately want to provide high quality care, but problems with systems and resources can often make it difficult for doctors and nurses to treat their patients well.”

Certainly the old days of scribbling a note on a piece of paper and putting it in a patient’s file are gone. But whether the introduction of technology has improved and streamlined care processes is a matter of debate by many health practitioners. As with any new technology, some systems prove a boon in terms of time saving whilst others are so complex that the practitioner sometimes feels they are spending every moment in satisfying the ever gaping maw of IT and processes.

But there are some technologies which can make a real difference to maximising patient care times. For example, systems which record and store patient files electronically can generate huge time savings. Gone are the hours of filing and the wasted time whilst you search for a note which has been misplaced. Instead, a touch of a button and the entire patient file is there before you, with notes, MRI images and other documents available to view instantly. Not only does an automated patient record help to manage multi-practitioner cases, it can prove to be a boon in smaller practices such as those provided by osteopaths or physiotherapists.

Undoubtedly our health practitioners have the will to provide top quality patient care at all times. With automated patient records freeing up valuable time, perhaps technology can lead the way in this transformation.

Guarding your back

In celebration of Chiropractic Awareness Week 2013 the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) has been encouraging parents to take care of their backs. According to the BCA, 79% of people have experienced back or neck pain at some point in their lives with 61% of those being parents.

More worrying for the parent/child relationship, 55% of parents reported that their back or neck pain prevented them from lifting or carrying their child. To help parents to prevent or minimise the effects of back pain the BCA has published some handy advice sheets on their website. The guides cover areas such as posture, stretching exercises, pregnancy, outdoor and indoor activities and play.

As you’d expect the BCA was not alone in promoting the Chiropractic Awareness Week which started on 15^th April. Chiropractors across the UK played their part in promoting the ways in which chiropractic treatments could help to treat or prevent back pain. With NHS commissioning for chiropractic treatments being limited, the majority of chiropractic patients tend to pay privately. This puts an added time pressure on chiropractors who not only have to provide the treatments but also manage their own administration as they care for multiple patients.

Making use of an efficient virtual service can take a lot of the pressure out of the administration burden and enable chiropractors to maximise their time with patients. Services such as telephone answering and diary management help the practice to present a professional image whilst minimising the time spent on administration or having to interrupt treatments to answer the phone. But it is the additional services offered by businesses such as Clinic Appointments which can also make a major difference to time management. SMS appointment reminders have been shown to boost patient attendance whilst digitising patient notes eliminates the time spent in searching through filing cabinets as the patient sits in the waiting room.

One of the BCA leaflets provides handy hints on protecting our backs when on the computer. For busy chiropractors and other health professionals we’d like to add one more item to the list and that is to reduce the time spent sitting down on the phone or computer and let our virtual assistants take the strain.

Innovation Grant for British School of Osteopathy

When finances and funding sit so firmly at the heart of the NHS it can sometimes seem as though every attempt to instil a culture of care is beset by financial restrictions. Not that care and compassion should be affected by finances but it can be hard to provide a quality service when time and energy is spent in scratching around for cash.

It is therefore good to be able to report on the British School of Osteopathy which has recently been awarded a significant innovation grant. Totalling just over £250,000 spread over a three year period the grant will enable the BSO to develop a new service called OsteoMAP.

According to the BSO website, “OsteoMAP is designed to support people with long-term musculoskeletal pain, which may be alleviated but is unlikely to be completely resolved by manual therapy alone.” The programme will initially be developed at the BSO’s clinical centre and then rolled out via training courses to students and qualified osteopaths across the UK.

In recognising and developing multi-layered treatments which address the physical and psychological effects of certain conditions this programme should both reduce the burden on hospital services and help the health services to deliver the Government’s aim of a more patient focused treatment regime.

One of the side-effects of this programme is that community osteopaths are likely to become more involved in the treatment of long term conditions and this could add to the patient mix. Those osteopaths who have switched to a more streamlined appointment, diary management and patient notes system may be in the best position to take advantage of this increased treatment requirement.

In effect, the more time which is freed up from administration the better. With phone calls answered by a virtual receptionist the osteopath or other health professional can concentrate on providing distraction-free quality care to their patients. And when it comes to a treatment such as osteopathy or physiotherapy, the less distraction the better. Interrupted treatments can not only be less effective, the very fact of an interruption can cause anxiety in patients leading to muscle tension.

Grants such as that announced by the British School of Osteopathy can only help to drive forward quality care in our health service. Targeted, patient-focused and aimed at providing long term therapies for lifelong conditions; treatment regimes such as OsteoMAP will reduce the day to day burden on hospitals and enable people to live a better quality of life.

Harnessing the power of technology

Speaking at the Healthcare Innovation Expo 2013*, the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, outlined the way in which innovation is to be used to drive the NHS into a future where it is “freed from the shackles of top-down bureaucracy.” Giving the online seat booking innovation which transformed the air industry as an example Mr Hunt bluntly stated that “while they innovated, we stagnated.”

In a speech which touched on the Francis Report, culture and values as well as regulation and systems Mr Hunt highlighted the care and compassion which is at the heart of our health services. He also called for patients to be put in the health driving seat.

One of the key practices which the Health Secretary believes needs to be implemented to transform the health service is the move to electronic patient records. Giving examples of ways in which patient care can be improved by the use of electronic records, Mr Hunt said that a paperless NHS will have “massive implications for improved patient safety, genuine patient empowerment and self-management as well as scientific research.”

Of course it is not just the NHS which will benefit from electronic records. Health practitioners both within and outside the NHS can find that electronic records will make a sizeable difference to their working patterns. For example, the Clinic Appointments patient records service is already helping practitioners to streamline their operations.

With patient notes, documentation and X-Rays all available at the touch of a button the health practitioner no longer has to spend time in filing or searching for records. This means more time spent on patient care and less chance of errors creeping in if important documents are mis-filed. Combined with the Clinic Appointments’ virtual receptionist and diary management services the secure patient records service helps every health practitioner from a sole practice to a multi-unit facility to provide a streamlined and efficient service.

Health services in the UK are going places and those who are at the forefront of innovation and streamlined technology will be best placed to make the most of the new vision. Putting patients first, innovating, bringing fresh thinking to health care; all these are on the Government’s radar. The Health Secretary closed his talk, as we do this article, with this quote from Bill Gates “Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time.”

*http://mediacentre.dh.gov.uk/2013/03/13/13-march-2013-jeremy-hunt-innovation/

Handing power to patients and professionals

As the fallout from the Francis Report continues to echo around the health sector it was refreshing to note an event recently which was purely aimed at innovating health care rather than indulging in recriminations. Think tank Reform got together with Imperial College’s Institute of Global Health Innovation to draw attention to some of the positive innovations around the world which we may be able to learn from within the UK’s health sector.

Acknowledging that innovation can be defined in many ways, the event focused on three fundamental innovations which could improve the quality of care and patient outcome throughout the health service; workforce innovation, self care and personalised medication.

A shift towards personalised medication is only possible thanks to the leaps which science has taken in understanding the human genome. With a greater understanding of personal risk factors comes the ability to target treatment on an individual basis. We are already starting to see the benefit of targeted treatments in areas such as cancer and as our understanding grows the potential for more effective treatments is limitless.

Personalised medication does in part require a buy-in from the patient in understanding the risks of certain life styles and family traits and the next step is logically to encourage patients to take more responsibility for their care. Self-diagnosis, arranging appointments directly with health professionals such as physiotherapists, managing self-treatment programmes is a step forward in understanding for patients but it will help to streamline the health service and target care where it is most needed. For example, a patient with muscle or ligament damage needs to see a physiotherapist or osteopath straight away and making them travel the health nurse/doctor route first is a waste of resources and time.

This leads on to the third and most important change which the UK’s health services desperately needs, that of workforce innovation. Doing away with rigid hierarchies and instead focusing on the individual patient means doctors, health care workers and support services all providing a flexible individual service. Beacon Health Strategies, working with the poor, elderly and mentally ill in the USA has done just that. Over three years the flexible approach has reduced emergency hospital appointments by 60%, reduced suicide rates by a half and got 44% into work.

Innovation within the health sector won’t be easy. It will require a sweeping away of the old hierarchies and a combined doctor/health professional service which is flexible and focused on patient care. Those health professionals who have taken steps to outsource telephone answering, diary management and patient records and who are therefore able to maximise the time which they spend on patient care are in a perfect position to step forward into the new innovative, personalised era.

A culture of compassion

Following a number of high profile reports into the standards of care within the NHS the Prime Minister has announced a package of measures which are aimed at raising the standard of care provided by health services. Alongside measures such as improved training for dementia carers and a defined career pathway for care assistants comes a vision for strengthening district nursing.

The attention grabbing element of this new package is the introduction of a “friends and family” test which will encourage patients to report back on hospitals. Designed to be in place from April 2013 the test will then be gradually rolled out over the rest of the health service.

The measures have been broadly welcomed by health bodies with the NHS Confederation chief executive, Mike Farrar, saying that “we have got to ensure that a culture of compassion is running through the veins of every place that provides care, no ifs, no buts and no exceptions.” But whilst greater training and a renewed emphasis on care and compassion is a major step forward, there still remains the twin challenge of providing patient care whilst coping with the day to day paper work and interruptions.

A survey of social care workers in 2012 revealed that just 15% of time was spent in face to face meetings with clients with the rest of the time taken up with paperwork, phone calls, travelling and other meetings. If that figure were to be reflected across the health sector then there is precious little time available for patient care.

This time challenge is one which is not simply confined to those working in the NHS, but is also a problem for those providing other health services such as physiotherapy and osteopathy. For them, every minute spent on paperwork and answering calls is a non-earning minute which is spent away from patient care. This is where the services of a virtual receptionist can make a difference. With calls being diverted to a virtual receptionist the clinician can concentrate on providing treatments.

With diary management and patient records also being taken care of, the percentage of time spent on patient care can soar. More time means the ability to provide full treatments to more patients; it means less of the “next please” and more holistic treatment of the person not just the symptoms. In short more time means that clinicians can step up to the culture of compassion demanded and in the process help to take health services to the next level.

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Tag: healthcare news