Adastra helps North Staffs Urgent Care successfully implement the Summary Care Record for Stoke-on-Trent GPs
July 2010 - North Staffs Urgent Care Ltd (NSUC) has gone live with access to the Summary CareRecord (SCR), facilitated by an upgrade to their Adastra Out-of-Hours Patient Management System. NSUC, a user of the Adastra system since 1994, provides Out-of-Hours care and advice to a patient population of 483,000 in North Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent and receives in excess of 105,000 calls annually. The project, supported by NHS West Midlands and led by NHS Stoke on Trent, has seen an initial 20% of Stoke-on-Trent patient records being uploaded.
Mike Jones, Connecting For Health Project Manager, NHS Stoke on Trent added, “The great thing about SCR via Adastra is that it makes it easy for GPs to see the SCR records; if one exists for the patient, it is made available automatically for them and the software alerts the user when the record is available. With 50,000 records of the 250,000 patient population for Stoke already uploaded and more GPs set to go live during August – we plan to be well past the halfway mark by the end of this year.”
Liz Gallagher, Director of Operations for NSUC told us, “This project represents a very important step in our journey towards the point when the majority of patient records are uploaded and available, via Adastra. We find that patients tend to assume that all the doctors and nurses they see have access to complete healthcare records at all times. If a patient, that is already feeling unwell, is unsure of the names and dosage details of their medication, access via Adastra to the SCR is certainly going to make any consultation much safer and faster for all concerned.”
The SCR, which is derived initially from the GP record, currently includes data on medication, adverse reactions and allergies. The NHS Personal Demographic Service (PDS), a central index of all registered patients in England and holds patient names, contact details and NHS numbers, provides the gateway to the SCR. The news from Stoke-on-Trent comes hard on the heels of the latest survey results from Adastra showing that clinicians accessing the SCR are seeing real benefits for their patients. 61% of clinicians sampled who had accessed the SCR during an Out-of-Hours consultation, reported that the SCR had improved clinical decision making and prescribing thereby increasing patient safety.
Liz Gallagher continued, “The quality of the consultation is only ever as good as the quality of information the clinician has to hand. We see this SCR roll out as exciting progress towards enabling information sharing for all clinicians caring for the patients in our region. We have been working with Adastra for 16 years now and they have eased us through the SCR roll out by diligently working with us on project planning. They have kept communication open through regular conference calls and they have consistently monitored and reviewed project milestones for us successfully.”
Jim Chase, Managing Director, Advanced Health & Care (providers of Adastra) said, “The SCR is important. Clinicians are beginning to expect this support when they work in the demanding Out-of-Hours environment and patients expect clinicians to have this information to hand. The beauty of the SCR is that it is a national solution and will be available regardless of the originating GP IT system and indeed geography. It’s great to see Stoke on Trent PCT and West Midlands SHA working so closely with NSUC to deliver a step change in patient safety and service.”
