COVID-19 Primary Care bulletin

14 April 2020

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

Dear primary care colleagues,

Thank you so much for the time you have put in in general practice to review the codes for our shielded patients. We recognise the task you have undertaken and are grateful that the majority of patients will be able to now receive support with minimum avoidable delay due to your efforts.

We have published our latest general practice preparedness letter today, as well as one for community pharmacy colleagues with the latest information and guidance we hope will be useful.

We also wanted to highlight the NHS Volunteer Responders service again to encourage all of you to make full early use of the volunteer responders for your patients. The volunteers are a crucial resource to support pharmacy and general practice activities including driving patients to appointments, collecting medicines from pharmacies and making regular phone calls to check on people isolating at home. Further details on how you can make use of this resource are available here.

Nikki and Ed

General practice

Preparedness letter for general practice

The latest guidance letter for general practice was published today and contains updates on changes to the GP Contract Regulations, NHS immunisations and child health surveillance as well as details on other guidance that has recently been published.

Child Health Information Services (CHIS)

The latest GP preparedness letter includes information on the importance of maintaining the routine immunisation programme. The Child Health Information Services (CHIS) and the systems which support them ensure that each child in England has an accurate active record supporting delivery of public health interventions including; screening, immunisation and the other Healthy Child Programme services. CHIS providers will continue to deliver these services during the COVID-19 incident.

It is important that all clinical colleagues ensure that each child’s CHIS record is up to date by ensuring the timely transfer of data from clinical systems to the local CHIS provider. This will ensure those involved in the care for young children will have access to contemporaneous health record to support any rescheduling and catch-up programmes at a later date for those who have missed appointments for public health programmes.  

CHIS are the definitive source of immunisation uptake and coverage data within England and, as such, are essential to limiting the spread of communicable diseases. This is important to monitor and ensure uptake levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the event of a cluster or an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease, CHIS is the primary source of information to help target resources.  

Community pharmacy

We have published the next of our regular updates for community pharmacy colleagues which includes information on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) following the updated guidance which was published by Public Health England (PHE) on 12 April 2020, the NHS Home Delivery service and the use of NHS Volunteers for collecting medicines, amongst other guidance.

Dentistry 

The BDA have created a poster on Staying safe at Urgent Care Centres to support you in getting to and from an UCC safely.

Dates for your diary 

Thursday 16 April 5-6pm: primary care webinar with Nikki Kanani and Ed Waller

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

• 15 April, 1-2pm: remote total triage using Engage Health
• 16 April, 4.40-5pm: COVID-19 giving your patients access to online services remotely
• 17 April, 2-3pm: remote total triage using Sense.ly

These GP Connect Appointment Management webinars will look at the steps required to enable NHS111 appointment booking to support the COVID response. You can register for any of these here.

• 15 April, 12.30pm: EMIS
• 16 April, 2.30pm: TPP
• 17 April, 12.30pm: EMIS 

Nikki and Ed's Link of the Day

RCGP Learning: Shielding vulnerable patients from Covid-19