Selena Stellman's activity
In group: Primary Care
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Selena Stellman posted an update in the group Primary Care 3 years, 8 months ago
Hi, I’m a newly qualified GP doing a fellowship in quality improvement working in Hammersmith and Fulham. I’m planning to do a project withb the aim of improving the uptake of annual reviews for patients with serious mental illness in primary care – wondered if anyone is/has done any similar work who I could speak to? Thanks in advance!
We have been working with Surrey and Borders NHS FT, who have developed a new service called GPimhs (GP integrated mental health services) and we have been using a short set of patient-reported measures to look at changes in patients’ perceptions of their health status, well-being, health confidence, patient experience, service integration, shared decision-making and social determinants of health. This has worked well.
Tim Benson
Dear Tim,
Thank you, that sounds great. Have these been patients who have already been quite engaged with primary care prior to starting doing these patient-reported measures? And have you found that their engagement has improved by using these? Intuitively one would feel that getting them to self-report and note improvement or deteriorations would encourage them to engage better. We are particularly looking at trying to engage those patients who are really difficult to reach – non attenders, DNAs, not engaging with GPs or secondary care so it would be interesting to hear whether you’ve had any success with these sorts of patients.
Fron an improving uptake point of view there is a trend to get patients to link any annual reviews with their birthday which makes it memorable and also helps to spread the reviews out over the year.
You could even send a card to outline your intentions to improve quality, which Tim has also touched on in his answer.
Thanks Chris, that’s a great idea. I’m not sure how we currently do our recall for reviews but I think this could work well.
Hi Selena,
We don’t really know a great deal about these people. However, there is evidence from other sectors that the very act of (1) collecting PROMs and (2) feeding this information back to their clinicians, can improve outcomes. However, I think that it may require both (1) and (2) – not just (1). We also have evidence that you must ask people explicitly to complete PROMs, so I am sure that it is the solution for people who are hard to reach.
Tim