One Care has been selected by the Health Foundation, an independent charity, to be part of its new programme exploring how to increase continuity of care in general practice.

The ‘Increasing Continuity of Care in General Practice’ programme is supporting five large-scale GP practices and federations with grants of up to £250,000 to carry out targeted improvement work to increase continuity in their practices to help bring benefits to both staff and patients. Each project will run for up to two years. The programme has been developed with the advice and support of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

Our project is called “how well do I know and trust my doctor?” Modern GP practices are focused on extending access to care beyond traditional core hours and finding innovative ways of working at scale. However, this can impact on continuity of care and result in fewer people being able to see a specific GP.

Our project intends to redress this balance across GP practices in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire, with the aim of reaching a practice population of 400,000 patients. The project will focus on improving continuity by increasing the number of patients that see the same health professional or small team over a period of time.

The project team will work with interested practices to develop a bespoke toolkit (including a digital toolset, delivery model, training programmes and patient materials) that offers two approaches to delivering more effective relational continuity of care.

One Care will work closely with patients and practices to establish their needs and identify vulnerable groups that will benefit the most from improved continuity of care.

As well as improving personalised care and patient satisfaction across all appointment types (face-to-face, telephone and home visits), better continuity of care is expected to lead to improved staff confidence, efficiency and job satisfaction through improved engagement with patients.

This project is part of the Health Foundation’s ‘Increasing Continuity of Care in General Practice’ programme. The Health Foundation is an independent charity
committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK.

Our annual shareholders’ meeting is taking place next Thursday 8 November 2018. We can’t wait  – we always love the opportunity to have all our member practices in one room. We’ve got a packed agenda, and will be briefly celebrating our successes over the last year, before using most of the afternoon to look to the future.

For the first time ever, we’ll have a guest speaker: Professor Becky Malby from London South Bank University. Becky is an expert in health innovation, change and primary care networks. Take a look at her blog here.

We’ll also be offering our practices the opportunity to explore our interactive marketplace. There will be a number of stands where attendees will be able to find out more about key One Care projects: general practice intelligence reports, telephony, patient information video library, general practice resilience and transformation, GPTeamNet and EMIS optimisation.

Watch this space for an update following the event.

Since 2016, we have been working with Bistech, our delivery partner, to implement a new telephony solution across GP practices in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG). There are now 59 practice sites in BNSSG live with this system (with 6 more set to launch soon), which translates to an amazing 1910 licensed Bistech handsets now in practices across the area. Each year, these practices receive 3.9 million phone calls and make 1.9 million outgoing calls – which makes a total of 5.8 million calls handled on an annual basis.

The opportunity for practices to access our funded telephony solution will close in early 2019. By this time, we hope that an additional 21 sites will also have signed up, making a total of 80. The Bistech platform offers a number of important benefits to practices. The telephony system is scalable and resilient, which allows practices to share calls across different sites and can facilitate new models of care. This can also improve operational efficiency and workload management. Not only do practices access funding to support capital costs, but they also receive new, fit for purpose technology and usually save money on outbound calls. The large number of users across BNSSG also means that One Care and Bistech can offer support and development to those using this system (such as reports, call analysis, staff utilisation).

We have had some great feedback from the practices who have had the system for a while, with practices praising the value for money, improved functionality and support during implementation.

For these practices who have already migrated to Bistech, we are now be focusing on supporting them to make the best use of it, through a telephony optimisation review. This will include sharing best practice, looking at how the system could support different ways of working and developing practice-focused reporting and analytics. We’ve also produced a number of training guides for practices.

We’re really excited and proud of what we’ve been able to achieve, and look forward to continuing to work with practices over the coming months and years to ensure we use this future-proof technology to support resilience and transformation in general practice.

25 practices across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) have now signed up to have a patient information video library on their practice website. We’re working with Health and Care videos to provide practices with a 6-month free trial of 340 educational videos for their patients. Over this time, we’ll be looking to assess how and when these videos are most effective in general practice. Videos available include a general set of asthma videos that can be shared with patients before an appointment and a series of pre-diabetes videos that have been sent to some patients in place of an appointment with a nurse.

One practice in Bristol already has access to their own library and their feedback is an indication of the impact this tool can have in practice: “Patients have said they have found it useful to remind themselves… It saves clinicians time as they don’t have to explain over and over again.”

You can read more about the potential benefits that access to these videos can offer practices and patients on the Health and Care videos website.

We are providing participating practices with a number of business cards that they can hand out to patients to signpost them towards the library on their websites, as well a suite of other promotional materials. Practices can also choose to text links to specific videos to their patients – which links nicely with our texting results toolkit that we recently launched. We look forward to understanding more about how this tool can support general practice in BNSSG.

In January 2018, we launched Health Jobs BNSSG, a recruitment microsite designed to support practices in attracting the best people to come and work with them. On the site, job seekers can find:

• The benefits of living and working in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire
• Information about the dynamic general practice working environment, including the different roles available
• Testimonials from current staff in BNSSG GP practices
• Practice profiles that demonstrate the unique characteristics of local practices
• Opportunity to register for jobs by email alert

In the last 8 months, the site has been visited more than 24,000 times and there have been over 32,000 job views. We’ve advertised 250 general practice jobs and around 40% of practices have used the site to advertise a role in the last 3 months. It’s brilliant to see the site being used. We continue to use paid traffic drivers, including social media campaigns and pay-per-click Google advertising. We recently posted another advert in the BMJ to raise brand awareness. Practices are also supporting us, with one practice being responsible for approximately 30 visits to the site each month as they have linked to it prominently on their vacancies page.

The feedback we’ve received from practices so far has been largely positive, but it’s often difficult to identify where applicants came across adverts if they are posted on a number of sites.

You can support the site by following us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

In general practice, everyone is feeling the strain of increased demand, constraints of workforce and income and increasing paperwork. We need to look at ways to reduce workload while maintaining patient quality, safety and experience.

At our shareholders’ meeting in November 2017, a local GP called Nicola McGuinness gave a brilliant presentation about how her practice had started using text messages to send patients results of investigations and tests. Practices hear frequently from patients that making contact with the surgery can be difficult and often many of the calls to practices are from patients who are ringing to pick up their results. It is estimated that approximately 70% of tests are satisfactory and require no further action. If a practice were to contact these patients proactively it would avoid the need for patients to ring in and, in doing so, give a better service to these patients. Furthermore, it would improve access for other patients in need of contacting the surgery. After the presentation, a huge number of practices expressed interest in having access to guidance so they could set this up for themselves.

Over the last few months, we have been working with Nicola’s practice and one other to embed the texting results project and to develop information, create training materials and refine the process so we can share it out to others. We have now published a set of guidance documents and videos to all of our practices. While this functionality is not new, our work will help practices to understand and navigate some of the implications of working in this way. We anticipate it will be very popular with practices, especially as feedback from the pilot practice has been so positive. One GP said “it has revolutionised the efficiency of my communication with patients and has prevented them from getting mixed or unclear messages about their management. Reports back from patients are fantastic – the majority love it.”

If you want to know more, get in touch!

In August 2016, we launched the Frontline Customer Service training programme in partnership with The Development People. In the first 13 months, we trained 700 members of non-clinical patient-facing staff. By the end of this year, we expect to have trained a further 300, taking the total to over 1000 members of staff from more than 70 practices. This programme has had incredible reach, and consistently excellent feedback from practices. One practice manager said: “Our team still talk about this course two years later and utilise the learnings on a daily basis“.

Thie idea for this programme came from our One Care Consortium project on improving practice telephony. To maximise the benefit of any new telephone system, the staff using that system need to have had consistent call handling training, so we worked in partnership with practices to develop a programme that would deliver just that. The course then evolved to include much more, and now also aims to introduce:

• Consistency of messages to patients
• Evaluation processes for managers
• Assertiveness when dealing with challenging situations
• Sharing of best practice

It also acts as an important foundation on which practices can start to implement healthcare navigation (also known as active signposting), which has been incentivised by NHS England as part of the GP Forward View.

The programme also benefits patients, as they receive a more consistent service from a more confident member of the team, who can start to offer support in directing them towards the right service. If you want to know more about this brilliant training programme, get in touch!

We have made a brand new animation for our practices to inform them about this exciting piece of work that will launch in October. Watch it below!

Building on the analytics work we have done over the last two years, our practices told us they wanted more up-to-date intelligence on activity, so we’re developing a model that does just that. We will be regularly delivering key activity metrics to each practice, such as telephony demand and appointment utilisation by clinician type, clinical profile and routine/urgent demand. This allows us to plot activity trends. Practices will also be able to set limits or thresholds for each metric, which could inform contingency plans between practices and across the system. We are really excited about this development, and once you’ve watched the video, we think you will be too!

We’re excited to announce that we have teamed up with Health and Care Videos to create a One Care patient information video library for BNSSG practices and their patients. This library consists of over 340 simple videos, which can support patients to understand their condition, find simple self-care advice and learn about a wide range of health topics. For the first two months, all practices will be able to access the videos using a link on the One Care website. From 1 October, the videos will go live on the website of any practice who has contacted us to express interest in piloting this new way of working. The trial will then be available for a six month period until 1 April 2019.

We will be carefully evaluating the success of this pilot and will make a decision in early 2019 regarding next steps following the trial period. We are excited to understand more about the benefits this could have for patients and practices in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.

On Thursday 5 July, the NHS celebrated its 70th birthday and we marked the occasion at One Care by holding an NHS Big7Tea party at our head office. Throughout the day we held a bake sale raising money for the RCN Foundation, we took feedback from colleagues about what they love about the NHS, and posted a Twitter moment to share what we were doing.

A number of practices across BNSSG also joined in with the celebrations – take a look at this picture of the Big 7Tea party at Birchwood Medical Practice, where they raised over £200.