Welcome
Welcome to the December edition of the NHS South Yorkshire Primary Care Bulletin where you can find an update on the latest Industrial Action, dentistry commissioning, working with the voluntary sector, our zero tolerance on abuse of primary care staff campaign and the Pharmacy First campaign, amongst other items.
Please get in touch if you have any feedback on the bulletin such as what you would like to hear about in the future.
We also wanted to wish all of our primary care colleagues a very merry Christmas and look forward to working with you in the new year.
Dr David Crichton Chief Medical Officer, NHS South Yorkshire
Dr Andy Hilton, Chair, NHS South Yorkshire Primary Care Alliance
NEWS UPDATES
Industrial Action
As you will know, Unions representing doctors in training have announced strike action for this week and again in January.
Members of the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA) will strike from 0700 on Wednesday 20 December until 0700 on Friday 23 December.
The BMA has also announced its members will take industrial action for six days in January, from 0700 on Wednesday 3 January until 0700 on Tuesday 9 January 2024.
The action will take the form of a full stoppage of work including night shifts, on-call shifts, and non-resident work.
These colleagues provide a significant proportion of day-to-day medical care, so it will impact on all aspects of services from primary care and hospitals to providers of mental health care.
This industrial action will take the form of Christmas Day cover. This means that most routine and elective services will be cancelled but full emergency cover will remain in place.
We expect elective and acute outpatient appointments to be affected on the days of action. Anyone impacted by this action will be contacted directly.
This situation may change depending upon industrial action negotiations.
Ambulance services, patient transport and NHS111 are not part of this industrial action.
Please reassure patients that they will be contacted if their appointment or treatment has been impacted. If they have not been contacted, they should continue with any planned appointment.
Please also reassure patients that they should attend their appointments with the GP team and other services unless contacted and informed otherwise.
Please continue to promote the use of NHS111 for guidance, advice and urgent care needs.
A briefing note including key messages has been circulated to all primary care by place primary care teams but please get in touch with syicb.communications@nhs.net if you need it sent over again.
General Practice Team Success
Congratulations to Sheffield’s Birley Health Centre who are celebrating a prestigious win after being named Nursing Team of the Year at the General Practice Awards.
The seven-strong team scooped the award from a shortlist of seven after a year of high achievement for the practice, with targets for cervical screening, foot checks and baby vaccinations all being ‘smashed’. You can read more about their win here.
Dentistry commissioning - focus on prevention
NHS South Yorkshire brought together over 80 staff at Rotherham Football Ground from a range of professions, including elected officials and healthwatch representatives, for a networking session on Oral Health and Dentistry. It is common knowledge that access to dentistry is an issue for some of our communities, in particular those from deprived backgrounds or areas of deprivation. We also know that we must improve our approach to prevention. For example, in South Yorkshire a child is four times more likely to require tooth extraction in secondary care than the average in England.
However, there are opportunities created by the ICB taking over dentistry commissioning responsibility this year, particularly partnership working across organisations and professionals. The session heard some great examples of this and the improved outcomes our children and young people were receiving from programmes such as toothbrushing clubs and better information on diet and sugar. The ‘Sheffield is Sweet Enough’ campaign being a prime example. This all fits well with our strategy ambition of giving the next generation the best start in life.
The dental contract is complex and can create barriers to both access and recruitment and retention but we can take different approaches to resources through schemes such as flexible commissioning and extended access sessions. The ICB Board are going to focus on this in the New Year and are keen to further explore Water Fluoridation, which in many ways is the biggest thing we can do to impact upon improved oral health for future generations, we'll keep you updated as this develops.
Working with our Voluntary Community Sector
NHS South Yorkshire leaders recently met with colleagues from Sheffield’s voluntary sector to hear about their work and to discuss how they can work more closely to centre communities in what they do, improve public health and tackle health inequalities.
The session was co-organised by Voluntary Action Sheffield and Karen Smith, VCSE Programme Director at NHS South Yorkshire, and builds on the work of the South Yorkshire VCSE Alliance to strengthen partnership working and collaboration across the health and care system.
NHS South Yorkshire plan to hold further conversations in Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham in the coming months. You can read more here.
Designing and delivering inclusive research
As part of the second phase of the NHS Research Engagement Network Development programme, South Yorkshire Integrated Care System (ICS) in partnership with South Yorkshire Innovation Hub and VCSE Alliance has secured £93,000 of funding to work with voluntary and community organisations, local National Institute for Health Research partners and health and care staff from across the region to share best practice for designing and delivering inclusive research. You can read more here.
NHS England - Your Best Practice Newsletter
Please find here the NHSE Your Best Practice newsletter, highlighting the amazing primary care and community services work taking place within ICBs across our region.
PRACTICE SUPPORT
Zero Tolerance to abuse campaign
We wanted to send our well wishes to the staff at Woodhouse practice in Sheffield after the terrible incident that happened there last month, which is subject to a Police investigation.
Primary care staff go above and beyond to provide the best care possible for patients and deserve to feel safe when they come to work. We will not tolerate any abuse or violence at any of our region's practices and will take appropriate action to ensure all staff are safe. Everyone has a right to be treated with dignity and respect and free from harassment, violence, and abuse.
In light of this, NHS South Yorkshire have recently launched a new zero tolerance public campaign backed by South Yorkshire Police called #NotInADaysWork. This will let everyone know that verbal and physical abuse and violence will not be tolerated and we will support practices to exercise their right to refuse to see or treat people who are persistently aggressive or abusive.
Please find below a link to our #NotInADaysWork communications toolkit to support the campaign. It includes newsletter and website copy, print materials and social media assets and posts that you can use on your channels. We will continue to develop further resources that we will share with you.
The campaign resources can be downloaded from the NHS South Yorkshire website: southyorkshire.icb.nhs.uk/campaigns
If you have any feedback or queries, please don't hesitate to contact us on syicb.communications@nhs.net.
Travelling abroad for medical treatment campaign
NHS South Yorkshire have been asking local people to consider carefully and understand the full details and risks before going abroad for medical treatments and procedures.
We know that within some GP practices there is a rise in patients requiring ongoing care from treatments abroad, some of which need specialist follow-up, not routinely available on the NHS which is why we have been speaking on local radio about it over the past couple of weeks.
We are asking patients to carefully research medical providers abroad and understand the care they will receive before and after the treatment, including risks of complications after having medical treatment outside of the UK. We have also advised anyone looking at planned procedures abroad to discuss it with their GP and/or specialist before making any final decisions.
Pharmacy First Service being launched
Please see here an important briefing for general practice on the launch of the new advanced service (Pharmacy First) for Community Pharmacies as part of the Primary Care Recovery Plan.
Under CPCS, patients cannot walk-in and access these parts of the service (self-refer); there needs to be a referral from an authorised healthcare provider. This will continue to be the case when the CPCS becomes part of Pharmacy First, newly named the Pharmacy First-Minor Illness Referral. Therefore general practice will still need to make formal referrals for patients who present at their practice but are then referred to the pharmacy for a minor illness consultation with a pharmacist.
The latest ICB CPCS Newsletter also highlights the future of CPCS as part of the Pharmacy First Service.
Decision support tools
The NHS South Yorkshire Governance Team have shared some useful tools to help patients make a shared decision with clinicians about their treatment, care and support options. They provide evidence-based information about benefits and risks and help patients to consider what matters most to them:
Referring to the Sheffield same day emergency care unit (SDEC)
The medical Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) unit at the Northern General Hospital enables clinically suitable patients to be assessed, diagnosed, start treatment and return home on the same day. These patients would otherwise have been admitted to hospital or potentially faced a wait in the Emergency Department.
SDEC is able to accept referrals for patients who can walk, have a clinical early warning score (NEWS) of less than 5 and do not require oxygen. Typical patients may have symptoms such as headaches, hypertension and breathlessness, but the unit is able to accept most non-surgical patients.
It is open for referrals from 8:30am-6:30pm on weekdays, and 8:30am-4:30pm at weekends.
GPs can speak to the Single Point of Access (SPA) to refer to SDEC. Out of hours, appropriate patients who are able to wait until the next day may be able to be treated at SDEC rather than admitted overnight.
North East and Yorkshire (NEY) CVD Prevention Inequalities Report Published
The NHS England NEY Analytics Team in collaboration with key stakeholders across Yorkshire and the Humber have produced a number of reports they are keen to make system partners aware of. These reports bring together performance against CVD Prevention Indicators alongside deprivation. Cardiovascular Disease is the largest cause of premature mortality in deprived areas and while NHSE have seen significant improvements overall there remains a lot of variation in care across our patch.
The reports are being hosted in the NEY Report Library in the CVD prevention folder on FutureNHS. You will need a FutureNHS account and access to the North Analytics Workspace will need to be requested – this should be relatively straightforward.
