This week we are celebrating Quality Week.
In essence, the week is about identifying and creating opportunities for shared learning and continuous development. It is also about excellence, ensuring our services are innovative, efficient and, crucially, safe.
Work like this abounds – and has characterised the overall emergency response to the pandemic.
We asked you to tell us about your work by answering three short questions.
Today we focus on the primary care occupational therapy service. Shonaid McCabe, project lead, answered the following three questions.
Question: What happened before you made changes to service delivery?
Answer: In March 2020 the primary care occupational therapy service began a period of growth, extending from two GP practices across 19 practices in the Bellshill and Hamilton localities. This coincided with the beginning of Covid-19 and a move from face-to-face patient contact to telephone and video consultations was required. This had a negative impact on the team’s ability to make use of visual resources and share information with patients during assessment, goal planning and intervention. It was noticed that some patients found it more difficult to establish a therapeutic relationship, maintain good levels of motivation and engage fully with the service.
Question: In very concise and simple terms, please tell us what you/the team has done differently to improve the quality of the service delivered.
Answer: The primary care occupational therapy service developed a visual tool – the ‘Personal health and wellbeing plan’ – to support patients to remember and act upon key information, goals and decisions made during telephone and video consultations. The design and testing of the tool was led by clinicians Katrina Taylor and Karen Symington. The personal health and wellbeing plan summarises each session, names goals identified by the patient, suggests actions agreed to take forward and provides information about relevant resources and tools. A summary is shared electronically with the patient via the SWAN secure file transfer service or posted out.
Question: Please provide an example of the real world difference this has made (without disclosing patient details).
Answer: Patients were asked about their experience of using the tool. Feedback showed that having access to the personalised summary of their contact with occupational therapy helped them to reflect on and remember what was discussed, motivated them to act on decisions made and reassured them that they are on the right track.
Comments from patients included:
“Good to remind me of goals and what I am doing between calls.”
“Gave me a bit of a push to try things and get back to doing things that help.”
“Simple and doesn’t overcomplicate things – a visual of our conversation”
“I could frame it!”
