Scotland plans palliative care summary

NHS National Services Scotland’s Annual Review has outlined plans to roll-out a national Palliative Care Summary (ePCS) during 2010.

The move is part of the Living and Dying Well Palliative Care Strategy and will be based on the Gold Standards Framework Scotland and the Emergency Care Summary (ECS), which has already been rolled-out across the country.

The record will contain twice daily automatic updates of information from GP practices to the emergency care record, from where information will be available to out-of-hours services, NHS 24 and Accident and Emergency services.

The review says information contained in the record will include: “Key patient information on diagnosis, care arrangement and resuscitation status and will provide major benefits to a critical patient group.”

The ‘self assessment review’ also details future developments of the ECS.

It states: “The programme has plans to future integrate with national systems in Accident and Emergency departments and with the Scottish Ambulance Service to enable paramedic access to ECS. It is anticipated that pilot will be up and running by the end of 2009.”

The review also praises the ECS itself, saying it is “highly responsive” and able to provide patient information within five seconds.

It says: “ECS records gave now been accessed over 3.1 million times by over 8,500 users across all health boards in Scotland, with an average of 40,000 accesses made every week.”

The review says only 1,745 patients, representing 0.02% of patients in Scotland, have chosen to opt out of the ECS. NHS NSS is “managing the situation” in Glasgow, where eight GP practices – out of 1,030 in Scotland – are refusing to upload information to the system.

The review also outlines plans to improve the NHS web-based information intelligence system, known as Navigator.

The system already provides access to a range of comparative information in support of the review, monitoring and planning of service and quality improvement in the NHS and allows users to drill down to see more detailed information on indicators.

The review says that the number of registered users of Navigator doubled between April 2008- March 2009 from 144 to 336. Navigator phase three is due to be launched and will enable users to compare themselves to their peers.

Link: NHS National Services Scotland.