COVID-19 Primary Care bulletin

22 April 2020

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

Dear primary care colleagues,

We hope that many of you will be able to join our weekly webinar for general practice tomorrow at 5pm.

Thank you for your continued and unfaltering response to supporting our patients and public.

Nikki and Ed

NHS Volunteer Responders 

NHS Volunteer Responders

As a reminder, you can still refer any patients who might need support while self-isolating to NHS Volunteer Responders for help with tasks such as collecting shopping and prescribed medicines or driving patients to medical appointments. The scheme is already helping thousands of people every day. You can make referrals through the NHS Volunteer Responders referrers’ portal or by calling 0808 196 3382.

We are encouraging primary care networks to seek to establish networks of volunteers and link with social prescribing link workers.

The scheme will soon be open for self-referrals. People who have been advised to shield can ask volunteers for short-term help by calling 0808 196 3646 between 8am - 8pm. Please pass this number on to your patients who could benefit from this support.

General practice 

Updating NHS Directory of Services to ensure it reflects your capacity status

We have today asked clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to ensure they have an approach in place by the end of next week (30 April) for updating the NHS Directory of Services (DoS) with any ongoing changes in GP practices capacity status.

The DoS provides real-time information to NHS 111, 111 Online and integrated urgent care (IUC), signposting and supporting the referrals process for patients so it’s important it is accurate, particularly now.

Capacity status information from DoS can also support several uses, removing or minimising the need for separate additional burdensome data collections, and so it makes sense to reinforce its use.

The information will also:

• support the COVID-19 primary care operating model and pandemic response
• provide oversight of GP practice capacity at a regional and national level
• enable service changes to be reviewed by commissioning teams and acted upon if required (support for practice resilience)
• support (but not replace) commissioners’ local escalation processes.

The capacity status field in DoS uses a simple RAG rating approach which can be found in Annex B in the Standard Operating Procedure published today.

GP practices will need to understand their CCGs approach for reporting which will likely be to a nominated lead at the CCG (unless the practice already has a DoS lead who could update DoS direct) and following your usual escalation processes. However, you will only need to report as and when your capacity status changes. Your CCGs local approach should be confirmed to you by the end of next week or early the following week after.

This approach will also shortly extend to cover other primary care providers.

Community pharmacy

Staff testing for COVID-19

Following Pauline Philip DBE, National Director for Emergency and Elective Care and Sarah-Jane Marsh, National CEO lead for NHS Staff Testing, letter of 12 April, contractors have been sent details on how their staff can access testing.  This has been sent in an email sent by the NHS Business Services Authority to the NHSmail shared mailbox of each community pharmacy in England. The email contained a link to an invitation template for employees needing testing. Pharmacy contractors or their employees should not publish or share this invitation or the link to the CQC online portal, beyond employees who require testing.

Returning to pharmacy or volunteering

Extra help for pharmacy would be invaluable right now, with pharmacy teams across the country under huge pressure because of COVID-19. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society are providing advice on roles or activities for volunteers or those who may wish to return temporarily to the register, based on their skills and experience

EPS one-off nomination in TPP SystmOne

One-off nomination functionality for EPS has been rolled out to all TPP SystmOne users. The new feature allows patients’ electronic prescriptions to be sent to an alternative pharmacy when their regular nomination is not appropriate, for example if it is closed or if specific items are required.

Pharmacies can be searched by postcode and opening hours. One-off nominations do not affect future prescriptions; these will continue to be sent to the patient’s regular nominated pharmacy. The one-off prescription will, however, be affected if the regular nomination is changed before it has been downloaded by the pharmacy.

EMIS is also developing this functionality for their EMIS Web system and will share further information on this in due course.

Dentistry 

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.

The most recent guidance letter and standard operating procedure for oral health professionals is available on our website.

Community health services

Matthew Winn, Director Community Health at NHS England and NHS Improvement, has published his first weekly COVID-19 community health, hospital discharge and social care update from NHS England and NHS Improvement. The new bulletin will bring together links to our recent publications, updates from our workstreams and a range of topical news from across the sector.

Optometry

The most recent guidance letter for optical staff is available on our website.

Dates for your diary 

Regular primary care webinars

• 23 April, 5-6pm: General practice webinar with Nikki and Gabi Darby. It will feature a range of updates including a focus on homeless and inclusion health with Olivia Butterworth, Lead on Homeless Health COVID-19 response for NHS England and NHS Improvement and Dr Caroline Shulman, GP in Homeless and Inclusion Health Kings Health Partnership Pathway Homeless team & Honorary Senior Lecturer, UCL.
• 24 April, 4-4.45pm: Dental webinar with Sara Hurley, Chief Dental Officer and Matt Neligan, Director of Primary Care and System Transformation

Digital First webinars on practical steps that practices should take to establish a total triage model

• 23 April, 4.30-5pm: using accuRx throughout COVID19 for video consultations 
• 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 

Coaching support webinars

• 24 April, 3pm: Coaching support launch webinar

Nikki and Ed's Link of the Day

Many of us will be juggling complicated home and work lives at this time – this is a useful read if you are