What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme of 'How can we improve across system boundaries?​

The NHS is under huge pressure. In this context patient care often falls in transition between services. Many staff are unaware of the nuances of what another service can or cannot do. Primary and Secondary staff rarely know each other and relationships are limited. The average GP in the new ICB world is often unaware of who their representative commissioners are when presented with an incident requiring system escalation. As such prescribing, referral and safety issues are often not identified at system level. Problems perpetuate and only those who shout loudest are heard. This has resulted in a more fractious Primary and Secondary Care Interface.

Providing a digital interface portal should help address some of these challenges by programming a platform to do the heavy lifting of connecting, disseminating, identification and collation of incidents, issues and themes to those personnel in a position to address them.

What does your project aim to achieve?

The project aims to enable general practitioners, acute trusts and commissioners to communicate more effectively regarding clinical issues and themes to improve care of patients across the Primary & Secondary Care Interface. In addition the interface will seek to extract and collate emerging themes to improve situational awareness for system leaders within provider and commissioner organisations. This will allow the system to address perpetual challenges more effectively, furthering integration and bringing to light the size and detail of respective system challenges.

In a complex system such as Cheshire and Merseyside patients often visit multiple providers. The platform will connect a GP in Cheshire with the Medical Director of a Specialist Trust in Liverpool in a way that CCGs were unable to do.

How will the project be delivered?

The project will be delivered through a project team based within Cheshire and Merseyside ICB including clinical leadership, digital leads, project management, coding developers  and stakeholder co-design. Following the design stage, bespoke development will occur which will likely take around 4 months.  In parallel the content and registries will be developed. On coming together. testing of the minimum viable product will initially be restricted to one Place and Trust. Following iterative development the aim would then be to scale up the product to cover nine Places and 17 trusts covering 2.7million residents. As such design for scalability will be crucial for success.

How is your project going to share learning?

As the challenges are ubiquitous across the NHS, the sharing will be of great interest. We have already shared our journey in Primary Secondary Care development at a national conference demonstrating the demand to learn and improve in this area. We will aim to  1) provide a learning capture assessment including the process of development and change 2) present at conferences 3) provide Q initiative virtual ‘tours’. In building scalability into the product there would be the potential that other areas could use it or duplicate in in there areas across the country.