At HTN’s first-ever Digital Primary Care conference we were joined by Dr John Parry, Clinical Director, and Dr Matt Curtis, Clinical Director from TPP, the company behind SystmOne.
Dr. Parry started the discussion by providing an update on TPP’s work to develop their products for the upcoming flu season: “The imminent start of the flu season is coming up and we’ve been working to further develop the SystmOne point of care solution, for the dual delivery of flu vaccines and COVID boosters. However, we are all still a little bit in the dark, the final specification uplift for this hasn’t been released yet.”
The discussion moved towards the subject of COVID vaccines for 12–15-year-olds, and Dr Curtis outlined the job at hand for NHS Digital to prepare for such a task: “It is quite a job and to identify these patients and invite them. Let’s not forget that there’s a group of patients who are going to be eligible for vaccination but will not be easy to identify. Those 12-to-15-year old’s who are household contacts of somebody who’s clinically extremely vulnerable, and I’m not sure if any computer system can reliably identify those.”
As mentioned throughout the conference, the NHS Digital General Practice Data for Planning and Research programme was a topic of debate and Dr Parry gave us an update on where it currently stands: “I think probably everybody knows that it has effectively been suspended for a while. We don’t know how long it will take, there’s going to be obviously a big public consultation to re-establish trust in this process.”
Dr. Curtis added: “It’s been a hot topic over the past two or three months and it’s probably worthwhile reminding colleagues that patients are still able, and should express a preference for opting out if that’s what they wish. Practices have a responsibility to capture that information and record it onto the GP record whilst it’s postponed, it’s still something that we should be aware of and doing when asked.”
The Care Quality Commission came up in the discussion, and the recent work on how to support practices during inspections, Dr Curtis said: “I think the way that the CQC presented this approach is very encouraging, in that their aspiration is to improve the quality of care that patients get.”
Dr Parry added that: “One of the great challenges that of course is practices work in very different ways, don’t they? In terms of process but simply also just how things get recorded, to make the reports adequately encompassing is going to be a little bit tricky. I’m sure we’ll learn over time but I think it’s a very good step in the right direction.”
You can watch the full session below:
