Planned Care
What did we say in Healthy Ambitions?*
1
The Planned Care pathway group identified ways in which planned care could be more efficient and effective, reducing variation and improving quality across the region.
They therefore recommended:
- A re-thinking about how general medical practice is supported to further develop clinical services and reduce the variation in outcome evidenced by Quality and Outcomes Framework indicators. This would entail developing strategies to deliver more specialised services for local populations that are covered by more than one practice; these would work more closely together in a federated way to improve local access.
- Further development of the GP with a special interest role by freeing up GP time through enhanced first contact capability by skill mixing. Much more could be done to broaden and enhance the services by dentists, community pharmacists, and optometrists with particular emphasis on health promotion and the management of long term conditions.
- Improved access to an increased range of local quality assured diagnostic/tests services for primary and community care clinicians by taking advantage of new technologies. This includes the use of approriate mobile services.
- Enabling much better integration between clinicians and diagnosticians through much fuller completion of test request forms to include symptoms and differential diagnoses. This will enable diagnosticians to advise on and undertake appropriate tests.
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