Supporting primary care through a Digital First approach

The Integrated Care System Digital team has continued to respond at pace to the impact of COVID-19 on our primary care workforce and our patients, and the need to support the implementation of a Digital First approach across the GP practices in Lancashire and South Cumbria.

This apparoach has included:

• Releasing an updated toolkit to national sentinel video group consultation practices and those who have completed the Lancashire and South Cumbria video group consultation training provided in April and May 2020.
• Promoting the opportunity to join the national video group consultation sentinel programme with a deadline of Weds 19 August. More details can be found in the Rollout of national video group consulatation training here.
• Delivery to date of 31 out of the 41 Visconn Hub Remote Video Consultation Units available. Training and deployment is ongoing through Redmoor Health and directly with Xuper Limited, contact Xuper Limited. The Xuper video consultation licences associated with the Visconn Hub RVCUs have a variety of uses including video consultations, clinic scheduling across practices and primary care networks and multi-disciplinary team collaboration. These can be used with the Visconn Hub RVCUs or independently as video consultation licences. Training is provided by Xuper by emailing Jodie Bellamy. A showcase event has been arranged for 2 September 2020 at 1.30pm. Please contact Anne Greenwood for more details or if you want to contribute and share your good practice at the showcase event.
• Continued deployment of Clarity TeamNet across practices and Clinical Commissioning Groups to provide the tools to support CQC assurance and collaboration. This deployment is supported by Robert Gardner who can be contacted for further information and support.
• 58 practices have now implemented and switched on Doctorlink and are actively promoting the use to patients. Doctorlink allows automatic digital front door triage and, where appropriate, referring the patient to alternative services. 6,997 patients have downloaded the Doctorlink app across Lancashire and South Cumbria with 2,256 symptom assessments completed, resulting in an approximate 30-40% of patients from primary care being redirected to more appropriate services for them. GP practices who would like to try Doctorlink should contact Anne Greenwood.
• The final funded cohort of Digital Champions have completed the Action Learning Set (ALS) Programme in association with the Fundamentals 2 practice programme at UCLan. We now have just over 80 active Digital Champions across Lancashire and South Cumbria undertaking a variety of activities to promote the use of digital tools within practices.