Vascular A&E audit

On Thursday 29 June Mr Michael Dialynas, Vascular Surgeon, spoke to consultants and senior nursing staff at Darent Valley Hospital about the new vascular pathways developed as part of the Vanguard programme.

A lively Q&A session helped clarify the new pathways and Mr Dialynas presented a number of case studies which illustrated what is an emergency transfer of care and what is not. Mr Dialynas also gave feedback on previous patient transfers which turned out to be non-urgent. There is now a five-day clinical vascular presence at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust. When in doubt about a transfer, clinicians should contact the vascular team. The non-elective pathway is also on Adagio and clinicians should familiarise themselves with this document.

Education sessions are being arranged for A&E junior doctors to shadow vascular consultants in outpatient clinics.

NHS England's Vanguard and STP Communications Event

Helena Unwin-Golding, Vanguard Communications Officer, and Glyn Oakley, Head of Communications at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, recently attended NHS England's first joint communications event for Vanguard and STP leads. 

It was great to see so many Vanguards and STPs from across the country assembled at the Kia Oval on 12 July. Delegates heard from Charles Tallack, ‎Head of Operational Research and Evaluation for NHS England, on how to use and interpret data. We also heard a personal account from Brigadier Kevin Beaton who talked about how lessons can be learned from the military, and applied to leading change in the NHS.

The event offered an excellent opportunity to explore how Vanguards and STPs can support each other going forward.

Read the social media highlights >

Computer Says Yes!

Keith Plumb, Clinical Programme Manager at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, blogs about how IT solutions are supporting the Vanguard programme.

From the very beginning we knew that access to electronic patient information held on systems at both trusts was essential for the success of our acute care collaboration. The IT model put forward to facilitate this is called ‘interoperability’, which means setting up a shared system to hold patient information that is pulled in from each Trust's Patient Administration System (PAS).

The advantage of this approach is that it avoids the need for complex integration of different suppliers' PAS systems, and instead concentrates on making the patient information available in a common format. More advanced types of interoperability would involve the ability to update patient information on the shared platform and have this update individual patient records held in Trust's patient administration systems.

Although the Vanguard IT workstream has a key goal to set up an interoperability platform between the two trusts (using the Local Care Record) to move things forward quickly, its starting point was much more pragmatic. Initial meetings with workstream clinicians and stakeholders sought to understand particular clinical initiatives or requirements, and make use of existing solutions to better enable these initiatives through IT.

Skype and remote access have been the prime focus of this enablement effort, and although the Cardiology workstream are currently the biggest users of Skype, and the Vascular workstream are the prime users of remote access, these services have been set up and are available for wider use.

Keeping IT simple is an excellent principle but of course in reality there is a great deal of complexity sitting behind IT solutions. The benefit of focusing on existing IT solutions was that the core elements were already in place at each trust, and therefore simply needed to be extended and tested across the trusts and their various locations.

Of course, existing solutions mean existing support arrangements, and one of the challenges involved in keeping IT simple has been getting the IT teams from each Trust on board.  Thankfully, the level of engagement and co-operation received from IT teams has been really positive, and I believe this has really helped efforts to deliver solutions that provide fundamental connectivity and access.