We are very keen to encourage primary, community and secondary care clinicians to get engaged with the project. If you are interested in helping to develop local care pathways, or just finding out more about the Map of Medicine please contact Dr Rajesh Gulkati on rajeshgulati@nhs.net, or Colin Cohen on colin.cohen@nhs.net
Introduction to the local Map of Medicine in NHS Tameside & Glossop by Dr Rajesh Gulati, full-time General Practitioner and the local Map of Medicine clinical lead for NHS Tameside & Glossop. He sets the scene, introducing the meeting today and what we hope to achieve. The audience are mainly GPs and practice nurses from GP practices in Tameside & Glossop as well as some nurses and managers from the Provider Arm (community based service) and also from the local Acute Trust (Tameside Hospital Foundation Trust) and some patients too.
Colin Cohen, Head of IT at NHS Tameside and Glossop and the managerial lead for Map of Medicine introduces the need for the Map of Medicine to support busy clinicians to help deliver quality care. He talks about the challenge of information overload for the busy clinician but also presents some interesting data on what websites GPs and other staff are looking at during consultations when they have the need to find information quickly on helping to better manage the patient. He also shows that GPs are already accessing the Map of Medicine even before this launch but hopes that more clinicians, managers and patients will be persuaded to access the Map following this educational session. This in turn will help to determine further actions as we add more local pathways and gather knowledge about how best to do this.
Daniel O'Donohughe has been instrumental in taking the local clinical pathways that were agreed by local clinicians and uploading them onto the Map of Medicine for access by clinicians and managers. He introduces the Map of Medicine interface and talks about the difference between national and local pathways and what types of information clinicians and managers could access. He also talks about the need for ATHENS passwords so that the local Map of Medicine pathways can be accessed at work but also from home too and how to search for a particular pathway.
Dr Rajesh Gulati, full-time General Practitioner and the local Map of Medicine clinical lead for NHS Tameside & Glossop introduces the first 5 pathways that have been launched in Tameside & Glossop, who was involved in the pathway development work, how easy it was to do this using the national pathways and other localised versions fom other areas that we could use for discussions too. He shares a couple of experiences he has recently had with patients whom he has seen where using the Map of Medicine in the consulting room helped to deliver high quality care and reduce costs.
Dr Amir Hannan, a local full-time GP in Tameside & Glossop, Map of Medicine clinical lead for NHS North-West and a member of the Health Informatics Clinical Advisory Team, talks about the benefits Map of Medicine offers for clinicians, managers and patients by helping to improve quality and reduce costs. He talks about the rollout of Map of Medicine across the north-west of England where 50% of areas now have it as "business as usual" and where over 550 local Map of Medicine pathways have already been implemented and are accessible now by clinicians in England and Wales. Finally he talks about patients he saw in his own clinic this week and who have been given their own copies of the local Map of Medicine pathways for them to read and use and to help drive their own healthcare.
Bernie Reid, urology nurse from Tameside & Glossop Provider Arm presents the local Acute Retention of Urine in males pathway in NHS Tameside & Glossop and how it was developed to describe a service that already had been set up in the A&E department at Tameside Hospital Foundation Trust in conjunction with the Provider Arm, the A&E department and the Urology department. Patients who presented in retention would normally have a catheter inserted and then be admitted into hospital for 5 days. Now as a result of the pathway, patients spend a maximum of 4 hours in A&E and then can be safely discharged into the community to be followed up by her Provider Arm service as per the local Map of Medicine. She is able to refer patients appropriately onto secondary care urology services if it is deemed appropriate and the patient cannot be managed by tablets alone. She then describes an unfortunate young man who went into retention following a skiing accident in Canada and how she was able to support him once he returned to the UK using guidance from the local Map of Medicine.
Dr Hannan, fulltime General Practitioner in Tameside & Glossop and Map of Medicine clinical lead for NHS North-West talks about what has been achieved in enabling the 5 pathways to be launched, how commissioners are using CQUINS to try to incentivise the local Acute Trust (Tameside Hospital Foundation Trust) to use the Map of Medicine in decision making at the point of care for patients so that it attracys quality payments for them and some of the challenges that remain for us as we try to embed the Map of Medicine in what we all do locally.
Yvonne Bennett and Margaret Rickson (aged 82) talk about why patients should have their own Map of Medicine pathways for conditions they may suffer with and why clinicians and managers should not feel threatened by such patients but should rather embrace them so that they can be guided to high quality care. Already all the eMPOWERed patients in the practice have received an email directing them to the local Map of Medicine pathways or clicking on www.htmc.co.uk/mapofmedicine. They realise that the Map of Medicine pathways are guidelines to help facilitate the consultation but also allows patients (and their family or carers) to prepare better before a consultation as well as after it too when they may be on their own. Margaret Rickson describes how she uses her COPD Map of Medicine pathway in conjunction with access to her GP electronic health record and shows how they both go hand in hand to support her care needs.
There is a lively discussion amongst the audience on issues raised as a result of the launch of the local Map of Medicine.
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