23 April 2020

COVID-19: today's round-up for primary care

Dear primary care colleagues,

#LookingAfterYouToo: individual coaching support for primary care staff

We recognise that our frontline primary care colleagues are facing unprecedented challenges through Covid-19.  We are delighted to announce that staff are now able to access individual coaching support by video link or telephone with highly trained, experienced coaches. 

This support is available to all clinical and non-clinical primary care workforce either employed by the NHS or contracted to deliver work on behalf of the NHS.

The aim is that this will provide staff with opportunities to process experiences, develop coping skills, deal with difficult conversations and develop strategies for self-management in difficult circumstances.

This service has been developed in collaboration with the Royal College of General Practitioners and will complement the wider range of health and wellbeing resources launched at  www.people.nhs.uk. 

Primary care staff can register here and book individual coaching in a way and at a time of day that suits them. 

A launch webinar explaining more about the service will take place on Friday 24 April at 3pm. 

If you are a member of the primary care workforce, the Institute for Employment Studies would like to invite you take part in a short survey to understand the current wellbeing of the primary care workforce, as part of their evaluation of this work. The survey will take no longer that 5 minutes to complete and will contribute to a valuable piece of research.

Nikki and Gabi

General practice

Update on shielding
The majority of the work to establish the Shielded Patient List is near completion. Thank you to everyone who has and continues to help with this process.

As records and coding have been updated, a further 79k individuals have been flagged to be at highest clinical risk nationally. Letters and text messages are now being sent to this group – starting on 24 April. You can find further information about the national algorithm on NHS Digital’s website.

Where you have not already done so, we are requesting that all practices make sure that they have contacted all the people on their patient list who are shielding as a follow-up to the letter. These conversations should: (a) discuss what shielding means, (b) describe any changes to their ongoing care and treatment, Including home visiting wherever this is clinically needed* (c) confirm they have an arrangement in place for receiving their medications and (d) check that they are aware of the government support offer.

We asked you to review a specific list of people who self-declared as clinically extremely vulnerable before 28 March which should have been provided as a task within your IT system (to be complete by COP 28 April).  Going forward, please review any new patients that contact you self-declaring to be clinically extremely vulnerable, adding any that – in your clinical opinion – meet the criteria to the list. 

Nationally, we are setting up an Expert Group chaired by Dr Raj Patel to consider what future support we should be providing to people who are, and will be, shielding.

* If the patient needs face-to-face assessment, they should be seen on a home visit, and not brought into general practice premises unless a designated site has been set up for such purposes. A designated site should be one in which patients with symptoms of COVID-19 are not seen. If a GP surgery is not seeing patients with symptoms of COVID-19, then a room in the surgery would be an option. Home visits remain the preferred option where capacity allows to protect the health of shielded patients.

Splenectomy patients
There have been mixed messages about whether patients who have had a splenectomy should be included on the shielded patients list (SPL). We can confirm that splenectomy patients should be included in the Shielded Patient List. These patients were identified in the central searches carried out by NHS Digital and were contacted by letter by NHS England and NHS Improvement to recommend that they follow shielding advice. Any patient with splenectomy who has been taken off the SPL should be contacted to inform them of this error. NHS Digital will be able to identify these patients centrally from 29 April 2020 and will write to practices with this information. 

QOF year-end process
We are aware that some practices have seen their QOF year-end actual achievement data. For some practices this will be lower than normal as a result of Covid-19 activities. We want to reassure practices that we are currently running an analysis to understand the impact and we will be able to make a one-off adjustment for practices who earned less in 2019/20 than 2018/19 as a result of COVID-19 activities. More details will follow.

Community pharmacy

Extending access to Shielded Patient Flag and SCR for locum pharmacists
To support community pharmacy teams to work efficiently and flexibly in response to Covid-19, we have been working with NHS Digital to extend access to the Summary Care Record (SCR). This will also provide access to the Shielded Patients Flag in SCR Application (SCRa).

The first phase of this work will grant SCR access to all locum pharmacists with the 5F locum code on their smartcards. A new smartcard role, National Locum Pharmacist + SCR – Covid 19, will start to be added to smartcards from this evening and will automatically expire after one year. This will be done centrally with no action required by individuals.

This role should be used when working flexibly at sites where you do not have a dedicated smartcard role specific to the site. 

Guidance on ethical professional decision making in the COVID-19 Pandemic
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society have produced a new ethical decision making framework to support pharmacists and pharmacy teams faced with making difficult decisions linked to the exceptional impact of Covid19. The framework can be used to support colleagues involved in strategic planning, or to help people with their medicines and is for use by pharmacy professionals in all settings.

A reminder to keep your NHS 111 Directory of Services Profile and your NHS website profile up to date
With more people using online services, it is important to keep your NHS website profile up to date.  The step-by-step guide for updating your NHS Website profile is available here. For temporary closures of more than 5 days please amend your opening times within the Dos Profile Updater, for temporary closures of less than 5 days please amend your RAG status to ‘RED’ using the DoS Capacity status tool which can be accessed from the login page on DoS Profile Updater.

Dental 

The next webinar hosted by Sara Hurley, Chief Dental Officer and Matt Neligan, Director of Primary Care and System Transformation is taking place via MS Teams on Friday 24 April at 4pm.

Profile

Dates for your diary

 Regular primary care webinars

24 April, 4-4.45pm: Dental webinar with Sara Hurley, Chief Dental Officer and Matt Neligan, Director of Primary Care and System Transformation

Coaching support webinars

24 April , 3pm : Coaching support launch webinar

Digital First webinars

24 April, 11-12pm: HETT: The prolific digitalisation of primary care in response to COVID-19 

28 April, 12:30-1pm: giving your patients access to online services remotely 

Nikki and Gabi's Link of the Day

Tech on the frontline - how NHSX & partners are delivering at pace