Frectally speaking

This months post was featured earlier in the Leeds Care Record blog.

You may have seen material here before about the leading work that the NHS in Leeds is pioneering…
Leeds takes a Lead
Leeds Lab Launch

This “Leeds Care Record: Whats that all about?” article aims to explain the related story behind the the Leeds Care Record.
The team who have helped get this up and running have recently launched a very nice site with further reading material and related resources..
LeedsCareRecord.org

To share the story more widely I’ll reproduce the article here..
Please see LeedsCareRecord.org for further details..

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This month marks a key point in the story of the Leeds Care Record. The Leeds Care Record you may ask …… what’s that all about?

Those of us who work in this field know that health and social care has become very complicated, complex you might say, delivered by a range of “providers”,  some large, some small, some generalists, some specialists, some healthcare, some social care… an amazing mix of people when one thinks about it.  Of course the aim of this whole effort is about the patient, that person is the middle of it all, who has a health or social care need and just wants to get better.

For patients trying to navigate the health and social care system we know that these worlds can be just too hard to navigate at times, not truly citizen or patient centred and simply more effort than it should be.  One of the underpinning reasons for all that hassle is that as time has progressed health and social care has evolved  from being delivered by single handed individuals to a large and diverse range of health and social care professional teams.  As that has happened (and it has happened over a period of many decades) siloes of information have resulted, (by accident rather than design) meaning a citizens/patients medical information ends up split or scattered. That information is often between the computer in your GP practice, the paper in your local hospital and across other paper and computer based records in community care, social care and mental health settings.

These information siloes have been holding us back from creating patient centred health services for some time now and simply put is the reason you have been asked the same questions all too many times. Despite pushes from on high in the NHS to move to electronic records, imposing such a solution from the top down has proved near impossible to do across a country the size of England, so in recent years more local efforts have begun to take shape.

So it is for the Leeds Care Record, a locally driven, Leeds city based initiative, supported by the patient representative groups in Leeds, funded by those who represent health and social care staff in Leeds and powered by the Leeds Teaching Hospitals PPM+ system.

Having built the foundations of this approach over the last year, the Leeds Care Record now brings information together, centred around the citizen and patient, from both GP and the hospital information systems, with community care, social care and mental health information to follow over the next year.

The lead up to this point has required health and social care teams to come together to explore new ways of working and we have already engaged with patient groups to make sure they are engaged and involved in this rollout.

With that early ground work done, the work to roll this out across the city began in earnest three months ago. By the end of August up to 400,000 patients (half the city population) may be able to benefit from this system. By the end of this year the vast majority of the population (800,000+) should be able to benefit.

As an emergency physician, and with every shift I do I’m conscious that better information could and should improve our patients’ care.  With the arrival of the Leeds Care Record valuable information such as patient’s medications, allergies and vaccinations will now be more easily available in an emergency than in the past.

We believe that this change will begin to make for a more patient centred health and social care system in Leeds, with greater efficiency, better quality care and improved safety.

We hope that the patients, health and social care providers of Leeds see this benefit before their eyes and we hope they notice that difference. We believe this is only the start of a journey, we thank those who have made it possible to get to this point and we welcome those who want to get involved on this journey with us.

Dr Tony Shannon, Clinical Lead for the Leeds Care Record

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Please see LeedsCareRecord.org for further details..