To hear that our Workflow Hub has saved 2,000 hours of GP time was staggering news. Working with Practice Unbound has been an incredibly positive experience and are excited by opportunities for further development of at-scale services across West Dorset."
Like many Practices, GPs in Jurassic Coast PCN in the Dorset CCG were reading and actioning the majority of letters that came into the surgery.
Not only was this a time consuming process, but fraught with room for human error due to GPs having limited time to dedicate to the consistent processing and coding of clinical correspondence.
Back in 2017, Practice Unbound was learning from the successes of their flagship programme Workflow, and developing the PCN follow up, Workflow Network.
Jurassic Coast Practices were looking for a way to make the processing of patient letters easier across their group, as well as looking for a project which could bring them together around a collective purpose and continue to build the infrastructure within their collaboration.
This led to Practice Unbound and Jurassic Coast PCN teaming up to develop a Workflow Network with the aim of saving time and sharing knowledge and expertise across the Practices.
Our Workflow Network programme builds on our Workflow programme, which trains non-clinical Practice staff to be able to read, code and action patient letters that arrive at the Practice, rather than the GPs.
Workflow Network supports Practices to put in place the right governance, indemnity, contractual and system requirements in order to process correspondence for other Practices within their local area.
It builds resilience and a sustainable approach to processing clinical correspondence. It also creates the foundations for future collaborative working by focusing on building skills in purpose, design and shared decision making. We provide a collated data dashboard which gives visibility to all Practices on the performance of the Workflow Network as well as highlighting the impact it is making.
With our blend of e-learning, regional Workshops and support from an implementation coach, the Workflow Administrators in Jurassic Coast are now able to safely process letters not only for their own Practice but neighbouring Practices too.
They use their collated data dashboard in order to plan capacity in both their administration and GP teams. For example, staff are able to quickly identify which days are likely to be admin heavy for GPs, based on their historic data.
Building on the implementation of Workflow in Dorset CCG which saw over 13000 hours saved across Practices and 68% of clinical correspondence now being completed by a Workflow Administrator, Jurassic Coast have taken it to the next level.
Bridport Medical Centre, where the Workflow Network is situated, processes over 400 letters per day for the 5 local Practices releasing at least 28 GP hours per week. That’s 121 hours per month, 1,456 GP hours per year.
GP at Barton House Surgery & Jurassic Coast PCN Clinical Director, Dr Danielle Farrell said that “Workflow Network has led to huge benefits for the Practice and patients in a relatively short space of time. As a GP, the daily administrative burden of managing the 70 or so letters/communications received (i.e. to read, code and action) was significant and time consuming. With Workflow Network I have seen a reduction in administrative burden for each GP of 40-60 minutes per day.”
Aside from the common benefits seen by our Practices across the UK, like improved staff retention and Practice sustainability, further benefits that the Dorset CCG has seen are:
In the future, the increasing sharing of data and openness of processes between Practices will allow the PCN to develop more personalised care and services relevant to its population.”
Jurassic Coast PCN are considering expanding their Workflow Network to include the processing of Pathology results within their team.
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