Every week, a GP from the surgery gets an appointment to visit a resident of a care home who has a medical problem.
Any observation from such a visit is recorded in the resident’s patient profile in the GP system.
The enhanced health in Care Home (EHCH) framework expects healthcare providers and Care Home staff to communicate better to improve resident care.
To support better communication, some GP surgeries have an assigned admin staff member who enters each patient note and emails each consultation to the Care Homes.
If the GP saw seven patients, an admin staff would email these seven consultations to the care homes.
The problem with this method is that:
This model can quickly increase admin staff’s workload and become a barrier for many GPs to meet the EHCH expectation.
It is also a duplicated effort!
Couple with the risk of missing out on some consultations due to manual human error.
With proxy access
The care home staff sees the consultation in the resident’s medical note when the GP enters it.
Anyone responsible for their care, like Care Home staff who needs to order cream for a resident,
can see what cream they are on and quickly make such a request without phoning the GP.
Resulting in time-saving for the carer and improved care for the resident without adding workload for the GP.
Benefits of proxy access
This Firmley ICB document summarises the benefits of proxy access for repeat prescriptions well.
But you can do more with proxy access
View consultations:
Fulfilling the EHCH is easier if GP practices give care homes access to view consultations.
This also gives them access to view allergies and medication, which can be limited to your desired period.
With this access, Care Home staff can view PRNs (medications that are used as needed, like the cream example used earlier)
Manage Appointments
It depends on what suits your current appointment model.
Providing pre-bookable appointment slots to only care home staff can be a way to manage your care home appointments.
Instead of emailing GPs with a list of residents due for a visit, the Care Home staff can book the appointment directly from the patient record in Patient Access
This will give both GP practice and Care Homes an audit trail of residents seen by the appointments.
It will also save GP time by having a different and often quicker pathway for Care Homes to access GP practice.
Save one working day with this proxy access hack
3 in 10 care home staff switch jobs every year
That means GP staff will dedicate one working day in a year to issue proxy access to an average size care home
But you should only spend such time when setting it up the first time.
To save this time, you should limit the number of care home staff who can use proxy access.
The max we have done so far is six staff per care home.
Once you have established this, you only need to replace any leaver with the new staff
To do this, edit the online proxy user details and replace them with the current staff details.
Reset the user account details and guide the care home staff to set it up on patientaccess.com
This will take about 5 minutes of GP staff time as opposed to a full working day.