Commission education for healthcare professionals in your area to improve the care of patients and reduce admissions

19 July 2010

The project which provides a specialist COPD support service for Bucks Primary Care collaborative of 34 surgeries, has only been running since the beginning of 2009, but is already showing encouraging results with a 20% drop in admissions for COPD. It is being led by Catherine from her surgery along with a small team of two other nurses (Frances Fry and Marilyn Plummer) and one GP (Nigel Masters), with the purpose of facilitating learning among the collaborative of 34 practices. She believes that the service works because it is run by the collaborative of surgeries for the surgeries: “It’s a bottoms up approach which I believe is effective because the practices tell us what their needs are and we try to fulfill them”.

During the first year of the project Catherine and her team visited all 34 practices to discuss how to move forward in the care and management of their COPD patients. These visits highlighted a lack of formal training with only 15 surgeries having a trained COPD nurse and no formal specialist COPD training among the GPs. Catherine and her team felt that a team approach was needed and so commissioned an Education for Health COPD Diploma Course for 12 GPs and 10 nurses.

“I’ve had the best working year of my whole career, it really has been phenomenal. The project has been very well received and all involved have been so enthusiastic. Although we still have lots to do to change attitudes, it’s been really humbling to see the results so far. I believe that if all we have done is raise the profile of COPD, and made healthcare professionals think more about the disease then we have achieved a lot” said Catherine.

Read the full news story here.

To find out more about how you can improve patient care and reduce admissions through team training in your area, please call Kate Bould on 01926 838978 or Nina Rawstrone on 07794 433896 or go to run a course.

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