Planned care means services where you have a pre-arranged appointment. This includes things like being referred by your GP to see a physiotherapist or consultant or being sent for diagnostic tests such as an X-Ray.
The CCG is committed to working with the organisations that provide these services in North East Lincolnshire to improve care and to look at different ways of ensuring high quality services that are centred on the patient are available as close to their home as possible.
Our priorities include:
- Developing integrated community therapy services
- Managing referrals to make sure patients are seen by the right person at the right time
- Developing an integrated neurology service
- Implementation of a community dermatology service
- Reviewing the local ophthalmology service
- Expanding physiotherapy services in the community
As Planned Care Clinical and Managerial leads for the CCG, we are responsible for ensuring our local planned care services are high quality and cost effective. As we all know the NHS has to deliver significant savings over the next four years. This means we need to look at very different ways of delivering services that maintain and improve service quality and patient satisfaction while delivering cost efficiencies.
As part of our local QIPP plan (Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention) we have been working with GPs, hospital colleagues and community representatives to identify services that could be delivered differently to support the QIPP agenda. We are currently working on a number of service areas and over the course of the next few months we will update this page on a different area.
Dermatology
We are currently working with the local hospital to move our Dermatology Service into the community during Spring 2012. This will mean patients referred to see the consultant and his team will have a choice of health centre venues and appointment times. It will also mean the consultant can work closely with our GPs to help support the management of patients. Following a successful bid to a regional innovation fund, we will also be installing Tele-Dermatology equipment in to each GP practice within North East Lincolnshire. This will let your GP take an image of a particular skin condition and send it electronically to the consultant for his diagnosis and suggested treatment. This will reduce the need for patients to attend separate appointments; help improve the GPs’ skills in managing particular skin conditions and free up the consultant’s time to see patients with more complex conditions.
If you have any good ideas of planned care services that you think could be improved, please feel free to get in touch with us.