Introduction
The Practice Liaison System (PLS) has been established as a mechanism for alerting GP practices to patients who have presented through SevernSide IUC primarily for death notifications or safeguarding concerns PLS can also been used for patients who need urgent follow up with their practice when GP Connect is not available.
The process involves a phone call the first working morning after an out of hours period to flag the patient. The practice should already have received the Post Event Message (PEM) which contains all the relevant clinical information from the Severnside contact.
Process
Adastra Case Report
To have a patient flagged to their own GP Practice via PLS is simple. The Clinician just needs to select ‘yes’ to the practice liaison question on Adastra at the end of the consultation.
A report will be automatically generated at the end of each out of hours period from Adastra. The report will be sent via to the designated secure Care Plan email account, which is: brisdoc.careplan@nhs.net
Allocation
Each morning there will be a member of the Rota Team who will be rostered to undertake the duty of alerting the practices of any information relating to their patient’s. If when we have received the report from Adastra there are an unusual amount of cases and you don’t think we will be able to process in a timely manner, please inform either the Rota Team Manager or Rota Team Supervisor who will assist in adding resource to allow the PLS to be completed in a timely manner.
Contacting each Surgery
The report will need to be grouped by surgery to allow each surgery to be completed with one call per surgery.
The first contact will be to call the surgery on either the bypass or main phone number. These can be accessed via MIDOS (via Brisdoc Weblinks). Please see the below scripts to use when making the phone call.
Before calling the GP Surgery the case should be reviewed to identify the reason for the call. To do this add the Adastra case number into the Case Search option on Adastra. Select the relevant patient, this will bring up all the required information to pass onto their GP Practice.
Standard PLS Call script
My name is ____, I am a calling from SevernSide Urgent Care.
One of your patients have been through our service and our clinician has asked if we could give you a call and flag their details as they may need and urgent review by their own GP.
Can I check you have received the case details from us please.
Each surgery may ask different questions but usually they will ask for details to look up the patient on EMIS. Once they have found the patient, please ask them to confirm they have the post event message (PEM). Confirm they have the notes by either the case number or date and time of consultation. Please note there may have been more than one case, therefore it is necessary to check all PEMS have been received.
Once confirmed we need to follow this up by asking the Surgery to flag for urgent review.
Thank you, please can you pass to the Duty Doctor or who ever you need to pass to for an urgent review.
Patient Death
My name is ____, I am a calling from SevernSide Urgent Care.
Unfortunately, one your patients have passed away during the out of hours period and we are just giving you a call to highlight the notes from one of our clinicians.
Can I check you have received the case details from us please.
Each surgery may ask different questions but usually they will ask for details to look up the patient on EMIS. Once they have found the patient, please ask them to confirm they have the post event message (PEM). Confirm they have the notes by either the case number or date and time of consultation. Please note there may have been more than one case, therefore it is necessary to check all PEMS have been received.
Once confirmed we need to follow this up by asking the Surgery to flag to their correct department.
Thank you, please can you inform the Doctor/ team that need to know.
No answer from Surgery
If the surgery can’t be contacted on the first attempt the practice will be called again until contact is made.
If after several failed attempts to call the surgery, we may decide to email the surgery asking for confirmation, this must be completed via NHS mail only with confirmed NHS email addresses taken from MIDOS and with the approval of the Rota Team Manager/Rota Team Supervisor.
This then allows you to move on to the next Surgery and during this time they may respond.
If by the time we have completed the rest of the patients on the PLS report you have still not received a reply from the email sent, please then continue to call until we get an answer.
11am
If at 11am we are still in the process of completing PLS, please inform the Rota Team Manager or Rota Team Supervisor who will then make the decision on if additional resource is required to assist with PLS.
Notes not sent
In the event of the surgery stating they have not received the patient’s notes:-
We will re-send the message through Adastra. This is the preferred option.
OR
We will ask for a secure nhs.net email address for the surgery and the patients notes will be scanned and e-mailed to the Surgery. This should only be completed if we have tried to reissue the notes and they have still failed to receive them. Please check with the Rota Team Manager or Rota Team Supervisor before emailing patient notes.
Recording
After each call we need to add the record to the PLS tracker.
Audit
Audits will be performed to ensure that we are ensuring a high level of Quality Care and Patient Care on every call with accurate data being collected and the appropriate action requested. We aim to call with the utmost professionalism and customer service, leaving the Surgery confident with the actions they have received.
Audit Criteria
Calls will be audited monthly, with two calls being checked for each person in the team. The team will be audited against 6 criteria, and will come out with an overall percentage score for each call which will demonstrate their performance level.
- Introduction – introducing themselves using their name and the service name.
- Accurate demographics – giving correct details as directed by surgery (e.g. NHS number or DOB)
- Call details – informing of correct details about passing case over
- Phone manner – represent SevernSide with professionalism and have a polite and pleasant phone manner. Building rapport with the caller.
- Next steps – should clearly explain to the surgery the process of what will happen next, including passing over for urgent review as appropriate
- Confidence – The Call Handler should handle the call confidently, leaving the caller satisfied with the management of the call.
Scoring
The various criteria have different weightings, with some being worth a maximum of 2 points, and others 4. Criteria worth 2 points can be scored at either 2, 1 or 0, and criteria worth 4 points are scored at 4, 2 or 0. Overall points are totalled and a percentage score assigned.
The overall scores are colour-coded as follows:
| 100% | Caller displaying exemplary performance |
| 95-99.9% | Caller displaying good performance |
| 80-94.9% | Caller needs to work on weaker areas |
| <80% | If Call Handler is red, Line Manager to listen to two more calls. If overall score remains red, call handler to receive immediate feedback and to have four calls listened to the following month |
Feedback
Callers will receive feedback on their audits monthly via email. This email will contain the overall score gained for each call, the average score of the individual’s audited calls for the month as well as the average score for the month across all Callers. There is also a ‘comments’ column where specific feedback can be addressed. The Line Manager of each Caller will be copied in to the feedback email so that they can keep track of their team member’s progress and can address feedback with them.
Total number of PLS completed
Monthly PLS Tracker and the Adastra case questions report will be compared to ensure that 100% of cases have been passed though the PLS process. If it is found that the numbers do not match, please raise a learning event and inform the Rota Team Manager.
Dashboard
Once the audit is complete, update the Dashboard with results of the audit.
Change register
| Date | Version | Author | Change |
| 25.05.2023 | 3 | Daniel Cotton | Full review and addition of audit process |