INNOVATIVE THINKING ON INTEGRATION IS
TRANSFORMING GP CARE IN BRIGHTON AND HOVE
Moving every personal interaction from “what’s the
matter?” to “what matters to you?” is the philosophy
at the heart of The Brighton and Hove Integrated Care
Service’s (BICS) vision for transforming healthcare.
This innovative not-for-profit social enterprise and primary
care federation of 44 practices has been leading the way in
implementing new ways of working for a number of years.
BICS is contracted by NHS Brighton and Hove
to manage all GP referrals and these referral
management services have been key to achieving
integration of services.
A team of over 20 local clinicians reviews 58,000
referrals a year from all practices in Brighton and Hove.
Dr Paul Deffley, GP partner at Sackville Medical Centre
in Hove and BICS clinical lead for primary care, says
this ensures the right patients are seen in the right
clinic at the right time and this in turn improves the
efficiency of the local healthcare economy.
From that objective BICS then developed a range of quality
community services which are providing more convenient
and accessible services closer to patients’ home.
These community services include an award winning
six day anticoagulation management service providing
services to 2,500 people in community pharmacies
instead of the hospital setting, integrated musculo
skeletal services, a memory assessment service,
a wellbeing service, community gynaecology,
dermatology and ophthalmology services.
More recent developments have focused on supporting
the clustering process in Brighton and Hove and
www.bestpracticeshow.co.uk
working towards a
federated model.
A collaboration of 16
practices called Extended
Primary Integrated Care
(EPIC) has been working
to improve access to care
and support services,
improve choice and help
put patients in control of
their treatment through
five workstream after
winning £1.8 million from
the Prime Ministers’
Challenge Fund.
THE WORK STREAMS ARE:
Dr Paul Deffy, GP Partner,
Sackville Medical Centre,
Hove, will be speaking at
Best Practice
BICS is also working on implementing the multispecialty community provider (MCP) vision even
though it missed out in becoming an NHS England
vanguard project. They have set up an MCP board
and over the last few months and have looking at
how they can support people who are at risk of losing
their independence by proactively working with other
colleagues in the wider health and social care system.
Dr Deffley says: “The initial organisation we set
up was mainly involved with community contracts
and developing those relationships but as we have
grown our ambition has changed to being more
about transformation of healthcare systems both for
individual contracts and things like proactive care and
MCP working. Our relationships with local healthcare
providers and other organisations are helping us to
change pathways and deliver outstanding care.”
•
Extended hours: Four clusters of four practices
have been formed to offer routine appointments
from 6.30am to 9pm Monday to Friday and 8am
to 2pm on Saturday and Sunday.
•
GP triage: Telephone triage by GPs at the
beginning of the day is ensuring patients are
directed to the most suitable professional for
treatment.
•
Pharmacy: Community pharmacy has been
given access to medical records so that
they can treat minor illnesses and common
complaints to reduce the GP workload. “This
was a very significant piece of work. We
were the only Challenge Fund collaboration
successful in delivering this quite radical
shift of making patient records accessible to
pharmacists,” says Dr Deffley.
•
Community navigation: Care navigators, who
can socially prescribe, have been introduced
into practices to help patients who would
benefit from onward referral to community
activities and personal support.
•
Redirection of workflow: Skilled admin
workers are dealing with up to 80% of letters
that come into practices, saving each GP 45
minutes a day.
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