Primary Care and Health Tech News Blast ep 3

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Hello eGPlearners,  in this news update- covering the big stories for primary care over the past week…. lets tech-enhance your primary careIf the first time we are meeting Im Dr Gandalf of eGPlearning where I look at supporting you with technology-enhanced primary care and learning so don't forget to subscribe and ring the bell to be the first to get notified of all these updates. https://egplearning.co.uk/Let us startGP partnership reviewThis piece of the future of General practice was released on Monday 14.1.19 as led by Nigel Watson with seven recommendations at the heart of the review. Recommendation 1: There are significant opportunities that should be taken forward to reduce the personal risk and unlimited liability currently associated with GP partnerships. Recommendation 2: The number of General Practitioners who work in practices, and in roles that support the delivery of direct patient care, should be increased and funded. Recommendation 3: The capacity and range of healthcare professionals available to support patients in the community should be increased, through services embedded in partnership with general practice. Recommendation 4: Medical training should be refocused to increase the time spent in general practice, to develop a better understanding of the strengths and opportunities of primary care partnerships and how they fit into the wider health system. Recommendation 5: Primary Care Networks should be established and operate in a way that makes constituent practices more sustainable and enables partners to address workload and safe working capacity, while continuing to support continuity of high quality, personalised, holistic care. Recommendation 6: General practice must have a strong, consistent and fully representative voice at system level. Recommendation 7: There are opportunities that should be taken to enable practices to use resources more efficiently by ensuring access to both essential IT equipment and innovative digital services.From a digital perspective recommendation 7 is key. Updating systems and allowing innovation must happen, Digitising records would be a major support to practices and help to tackle another uncosted area on subject access requests. Taking this burden away from partners would be very useful. Also working better with statutory organisations for reports for DWP and DVLA would be helpful and reduce considerable administrative burdens on practices. In this past week I have done three reports for the same patient all relating to the DWP- one unified system would reduce unnecessary workload. Updating our IT infrastructure and policies more in line with consumer tech is also a must. Tackling the ‘computer says no’ mentality due to a reliance on legacy IT would allow primary care to truly innovate, and I eagerly await the day I do not have to use internet explorer 8 in practice. Many will know I have been critical of the interim review which was published last year. The final review is, however, a good document that identifies the challenges facing partnership and also commends the positive impact the partnership model has in primary care. Several of the recommendations are high quality and call on other pieces of work to deliver an improvement for partnership in practice- particularly the call for a sort out of indemnity and the premises review. I do still feel strongly that a key piece lacking is a direct request to increase the global sum funding for practices, as this would significantly and rapidly improve the partnership the workload impact for partners and attract more staff making it more viable and sustainable. I do still see this as a major omission of the review which is in the terms of reference. It should have been requested and using the long term plan as the vehicle to suggest increased funding does not directly help as this still r