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Showing results for tags 'Outpatients'.
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Community PostAre you a GP or other healthcare professional working in primary care? Have you noticed an increase in rejected referrals to outpatient services/for scans and other investigations? How have changes to the referral system affected you? What communication relating to referrals have you received recently from the NHS? What has the impact been on your own workload and wellbeing, and the safety of patients? Please share your experiences with us so we can continue to highlight this important issue.
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- GP
- Outpatients
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Community PostIncidents per 1000 bed days – what does this actually mean? How is this sum used to quantify incidents reported in an outpatient setting?
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Content ArticleSerious case reviews from the past twenty years have repeatedly highlighted the absence of professional curiosity as a core failing in the actions of health and social care professionals. However, 'professional curiosity' as a term is still not commonly used amongst healthcare professionals and there is no shared understanding of its meaning. This paper published by Diabetes on the Net, critically reviews current research surrounding professional curiosity and discusses the main themes. explores how inter-agency working can promote professional curiosity by supporting healthcare professionals to overcome the complex barriers that may arise during safeguarding cases. It discusses the role of Children and Young People’s diabetes clinics as an ideal platform for utilising the benefits of professional curiosity.
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- Children and Young People
- Safety culture
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Content ArticleSpecialty referrals—when a clinician refers a patient to a specialist for evaluation or treatment—are on the rise in the US. Despite the introduction of electronic health records (EHRs), the referral process is often hindered by lack of clarity over roles, communication breakdowns, workloads and variations in requirements among specialists. These difficulties can lead to missed or delayed diagnoses, delays in treatment and other lapses in patient safety. This guide from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement offers recommendations that aim to help standardise how primary care practitioners activate referrals to specialists and then keep track of the information over time. It describes a nine-step, closed-loop process in which all relevant patient information is communicated to the correct person through the appropriate channels, in a timely manner.
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- USA
- Electronic Health Record
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Content ArticleThe pandemic has had an enormous impact on health and care services in the UK. In this article, Nuffield Trust fellows Jessica Morris and Sarah Reed take a closer look at access and waiting times before and after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. They highlight that before the pandemic, pressure on the system was already reducing access to NHS services and making waiting times longer. Covid-19 has made the situation significantly worse due to the need for heightened infection control practices, rising levels of staff sickness and burnout, the cancellation of routine care and redirection of staff. Enabling services to recover will be challenging given these ongoing pressures and real-term budget cuts for the NHS this year. The article examines the impact of the pandemic on waiting times relating to: General practice Elective (planned) care Diagnostic testing Cancer care A&E Ambulance
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- Pandemic
- Long waiting list
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Content Article
BMJ - Scan first, ask questions later? (18 August 2022)
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Diagnosis
In this opinion piece in The BMJ, consultant radiologist Giles Maskell examines changes to the ways in which medical imaging is used in the health service. He states that imaging used to be ordered, when necessary, at the end of a diagnostic process, whereas now many doctors are asking for scans before they will see a patient for the first time. The article highlights some of the implications of this shift in practice, including on screening service capacity and on the interpretation of test results. -
Content ArticleThe Department of Health today published the 2021/22 Inpatient, Day Case and Outpatient Hospital Statistics for Northern Ireland. Analysed by HSC Trust, hospital and specialty, these Hospital Statistics publications outline: the number of inpatient and day case admissions. the number of attendances at consultant led outpatient services in Northern Ireland during 2021/22.
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- Northern Ireland
- Outpatients
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Content ArticleWith the number of outpatient hospital appointments in England recently as high as 125 million per year and a huge elective care backlog following the Covid-19 pandemic, patient-initiated follow-up on outpatient appointments has been touted as a potential solution in appropriate cases. But can it free up much-needed capacity while maintaining quality of patient experience and outcomes? As the NHS begins to expand its use of the approach, the NIHR RSET research team has conducted a first review of the available evidence.
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- Patient engagement
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Content ArticleThis opinion piece by GP educator and writer John Launer looks at the current delays and cancellations to routine appointments facing patients with long term conditions. He describes his personal experience of waiting three years with no face-to-face of phone appointment to review his condition, when this should happen every six months. John outlines the fact that routine outpatient care in some hospitals is unravelling, but with no monitoring of the situation and without publicity. He highlights the risks for patients who are not receiving the regular contact with healthcare professionals that they need, including medical complications, emergency admissions and even preventable deaths. There is particularly risk to patients who do not feel able to contact their consultant or specialist. When speaking to the hospital department about how the risks were being mitigated, John was concerned to discover that there were no screening procedures in place for clinicians to determine which patients were at highest risk; no prioritisation as going on and there was no system in place to monitor the consequences of this.
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- Underlying health conditions
- Long waiting list
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Content ArticleThis German study in the Journal of Patient Safety aimed to analyse the strength of safety measures described in incident reports in outpatient care. 184 medical practices were invited to submit anonymous incident reports to the project team three times in 17 months. The authors coded the incident reports and safety measures, classifying them as as “strong” (likely to be effective and sustainable), “intermediate” (possibly effective and sustainable) or “weak” (less likely to be effective and sustainable). The study found that the proportion of weak measures was high, which indicates that practices need more support in identifying strong patient safety measures.
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- Outpatients
- Case report
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Content ArticleThis study in BMJ Open examines the impacts of the four episodes of industrial action by English junior doctors in early 2016. The authors looked at the impact of the strikes on A&E visits, outpatient appointments and cancellations, admitted patients and all in-hospital mortality. The study concluded that industrial action by junior doctors during early 2016 had a significant impact on the healthcare provided by English hospitals. It also found that t here were regional variations in how these strikes affected providers, and that there was not a measurable increase in mortality on strike days.
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- Safe staffing
- Staff factors
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Content ArticleActive surveillance (AS) is an option in the management of men with low-stage, low-risk prostate cancer. These patients, who often require prolonged follow-up, can put a strain on outpatient resources. Nurses are ideally placed to develop advanced roles to help meet this increased demand—a model Martin et al. have utilised since 2014. The authors set about to comprehensively evaluate their nurse-led AS (NLAS) programme. The study found that nurse-led active surveillance is safe and effective. Patients and stakeholders alike held positive views of the programme.
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- Mens health
- Cancer
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Content Article
Prostate Cancer UK: Personalised stratified follow-up
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Men's health
This cost-effective programme for personalised stratified follow-up delivers better outcomes for prostate cancer patients and has been shown to free up capacity in the follow-up pathway. The programme moves follow-up care from outpatient clinics to remote monitoring. Men who are eligible for remote follow up therefore don't need to attend routine appointments unless an issue arises. This web page gives advice, guidance and tools, and examples of hospital trusts that took part in the pilot.- Posted
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- Cancer
- Mens health
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Content ArticleThe Re-Engineered Discharge (Project RED) programme is a nationally recognised best practice centered on delivering a patient-tailored hospital discharge plan demonstrated to reduce all-cause 30-day readmissions and improve safety during care transitions. In this study, Mitchell et al. implemented the RED in 10 hospitals to study the implementation process.
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- Discharge
- Readmission
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Content ArticleMyalgic encephalomyelitis (ME)/chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is characterised by persistent and disabling fatigue, exercise intolerance, cognitive difficulty, and musculoskeletal/joint pain. Post-exertional malaise is a worsening of these symptoms after a physical or mental exertion and is considered a central feature of the illness. Scant observations in the available literature provide qualitative assessments of post-exertional malaise in patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. To enhance our understanding, Stussman et al. formed focus groups and listened to patients’ experiences to better understand post-extertional malaise. The authors found that the experience of post-exertional malaise in ME/CFS varies greatly between individuals and leads to a diminished quality of life. ME/CFS patients describe post-exertional malaise as all-encompassing with symptoms affecting every part of the body, difficult to predict or manage, and requiring complete bedrest to fully or partially recover. Given the extensive variability in patients, further research identifying subtypes of post-exertional malaise could lead to better targeted therapeutic options.
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Content ArticleLeeds Hospital NHS Trust has developed a range of patient leaflets. These leaflets inform patients and relatives about the changes to their care and different processes during the pandemic.
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- Information sharing
- Patient
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Content ArticleOut-patient Parenteral Antibiotic Therapy (OPAT) is now a routine part of care in the UK following demonstration that it is safe and effective for patients and OPAT is now being actively promoted as part of the UK government’s stewardship initiatives. NHS North Tees and Hartlepool share their experience of redesigning their OPAT services. See the attachment below for details on the project.
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- Medicine - Respiratory
- Medical device
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Content ArticlePrimary care services provide an entry point into the health system which directly impact's people well-being and their use of other healthcare resources. Patient safety has been recognised as an issue of global importance for the past 10 years. Unsafe primary and ambulatory care results in greater morbidity, higher healthcare usage and economic costs. According to data from World Health Organization (WHO), the risk of a patient dying from preventable medical accident while receiving health care is 1 in 300, which is much higher than risk of dying while travelling in an airplane. Unsafe medication practices and inaccurate and delayed diagnosis are the most common causes of patient harm which affects millions of patients globally. However, the majority of the work has been focused on hospital care and there is very less understanding of what can be done to improve patient safety in primary care. Provision of safe primary care is priority as every day millions of people use primary care services across the world. The paper from Kuriakose et al., published in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care, focuses on various aspects of patient safety, especially in the primary care settings and also provides some potential solutions in order to reduce patient harm as much as possible. Some important challenges regarding patient safety in India are also highlighted.
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- Outpatients
- Primary care
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Content ArticleFollowing the inquest into the death of former patient Amy Allan and the subsequent Preventing Future Deaths report given to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, Chief Executive Matthew Shaw would like to outline how the hospital is learning from this and what action has been taken to address the concerns that have been raised.
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- Hospital ward
- Outpatients
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Content ArticlePrimary care services provide an entry point into the health system which directly impact's people well-being and their use of other health care resources. Patient safety has been recognised as an issue of global importance for the past 10 years. Unsafe primary and ambulatory care results in greater morbidity, higher healthcare usage and economic costs. According to data from World Health Organisation (WHO), the risk of a patient dying from preventable medical accident while receiving health care is 1 in 300, which is much higher than risk of dying while travelling in an airplane. Unsafe medication practices and inaccurate and delayed diagnosis are the most common causes of patient harm which affects millions of patients globally. However, majority of the work has been focussed on hospital care and there is very less understanding of what can be done to improve patient safety in primary care. Provision of safe primary care is priority as every day millions of people use primary care services across the world. This paper, published in The Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care, focuses on various aspects of patient safety, especially in the primary care settings and also provides some potential solutions in order to reduce patient harm as much as possible. Some important challenges regarding patient safety in India are also highlighted.
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- GP
- GP practice
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Content ArticleAntimicrobial resistance leads to increased morbidity, mortality and healthcare costs worldwide. In order to contain antimicrobial resistance, Antibiotic Stewardship Programs (ASP) have been developed to measure and improve the appropriateness of antimicrobial use. A common way to measure the appropriateness of antimicrobial use is by evaluating whether antimicrobials are prescribed according to local guidelines and if not available, to national or international guidelines.
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- Prescribing
- Outpatients
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Content Article
Outpatient hysteroscopy: RCOG patient leaflet
Claire Cox posted an article in Women's health
This leaflet, produced by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the British Society for Gynaecological Endoscopy, is for individuals who have been offered hysteroscopy as an outpatient. It may also be helpful if you are a partner, relative or friend of someone who has been offered this procedure.- Posted
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- Patient
- Outpatients
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