We recently visited Woodhall Spa New Surgery to investigate and learn how they have been utilising the “protocols” feature on SystmOne to assist them making high quality onward referrals to the correct service.
Protocols are an option for all surgeries who use SystmOne. They can be automatically triggered when certain criteria are met or set to manually generate a referral when a search is made on a chosen trigger word or phrase. A flow can be developed within the system, which you can set to ask a series of questions which clinicians can use to narrow down the eligibility criteria and eventually bring you to the correct referral form. Tasks can also be set at any point, to ensure that other stakeholders within the referral process at the surgery are notified to ensure everyone is on the same page and nothing gets missed.
Woodhall Spa have been utilising this feature for all the One You Lincolnshire Pathways, including Child Weight Management. Most notably, to ensure that there is no confusion when referring patients to either One You Lincolnshire, or the Healthier You NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme. The use of protocols is essentially this flow chart loaded in to your SystmOne. (in the downloads section) The team at Woodhall has found this really useful when welcoming locum staff, or trainee staff to ensure referrals are sent to the right service.
Thank you to Jenny Bentley-Hicks and Tessa Clark at Woodhall Spa for accommodating us and showing us this.
On the One You Lincolnshire Partnership and Engagement team, we have access to Smart Cards, so would happily come to your surgery to have a look at helping you implement protocols. Jenny at Woodhall Spa has also offered to help if protocols is something you have already looked at doing, but have had difficulty doing so. Please drop us a email referral@oneyoulincolnshire.org.uk if you would like to explore protocols.
.jpg)
