Unscheduled Care Parallel Session

Unscheduled Care Parallel Session

Facilitated by Fiona MacKenzie

Scribe Notes - 13 September 2016

Definition for unscheduled care was put up on the screen. Despite everyone agreeing that unscheduled care was quite difficult to define the definition given was considered accurate.

Primary Care (In-hours): Fiona (Facilitator) stated that ISD are ‘excited’ about the establishment of SPIRE – A question was posed as to whether Primary Care are excited about the commencement of the SPIRE project. Fiona explained that this is difficult to judge at the moment; it will probably depend on the bespoke questions being asked.

A slide was presented which illustrated all possible routes a patient could take for unscheduled care. This was very well received by those in the room and suggestion was made to replicate this slide for each HSCP and distribute to chief officers. Audience also thought that it would be interesting to include ‘time stamps’ for this to link unscheduled care activity with primary care hours (i.e. is there a spike in unscheduled care activity after GP surgeries have shut?). Fiona stated that this is possible but could make the flow chart look messy.

PPAs: Question was raised as to whether it would be possible to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate A&E attendances and admissions. Mairi Watson mentioned the Potentially Preventable Admissions work that would identify this.

Not conveyed category for SAS: Audience agreed the need to split this category into % seen and treated and % that refused to travel in ambulance. NHS GG&C are commencing a pilot which will interrogate the ‘Not conveyed’ category data; this has been established due to the fact that GPs will not be made aware if one of their patients were ‘seen & treated’ by SAS. This has caused concern as some individuals, particularly with drug and alcohol issues may be treated by SAS frequently without their GP knowing.

To conclude, Fiona highlighted that there are lots of variation in unscheduled care data across HSCPs and so it is important to get feedback from partnerships to identify the topics that are important to them; this could also highlight areas for some analysis to be stopped, allowing for more meaningful analysis to be rolled out.