Across NHS settings, 80% of HF is currently diagnosed in hospital, despite 40% of patients having symptoms that should have triggered an earlier assessment. The NHS Long Term Plan ambition is that people with HF and heart valve disease will be better supported by multi-disciplinary teams (MDTs) as part of primary care networks (PCNs).
The cardiology specialist team at North Bristol Trust (NBT) identified an increase in HF referrals from GP practices across Bristol, North Somerset, and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG), whereby people with worsening HF were not optimised in primary care. North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT) and BNSSG Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) – in partnership with Soar Beyond – invited GP practices across BNSSG to express interest in a structured HF training programme as a proof of concept.
Project to demonstrate that with a consistent competency framework and tailored training and mentorship programme, 30 clinicians across BNSSG can conduct effective HF reviews in practice. The multi-professional programme, which runs from March to August 2022, aims to help aspiring clinicians improve their competence and confidence to provide high quality care to people with HF and expand HF expertise and competence in primary care to alleviate referrals into secondary care, and to improve the early detection of HF at scale. The aim was to do so in a multi-professional way utilising both primary care nurses and primary care pharmacists to deliver primary care heart failure management to the same competence framework in HF.
In March 2022, Soar Beyond’s 4DTM pathway methodology was strategically adopted to utilise the SMART platform to Diagnose the competence of the 30 clinicians against a standardised multiprotection competency framework. This framework was co-produced by Soar Beyond and NBT. Three multiprotection mentors were also onboarded onto SMART.
initial stage was to develop and a agree a set of competencies for nurses and pharmacists in HF for nurses and pharmacists to develop towards with both nurses and pharmacist mentors who could then use SMART to support, develop and sign off competencies. Alongside four blended workshops (two face-to-face and two virtual) during March-July 2022, each of the 30 clinicians received one-to-one sessions with their mentors on SMART whereby individualised capability reviews and development plans were generated using the platform’s capability mapping functionality. Furthermore, Soar Beyond’s project lead analysed SMART’s capability map for the cohort as a whole to identify common gaps in knowledge and / or skills. The capability map data helped shape the content of the workshops by targeting these gaps.
Northern Ireland has a national programme of GP Pharmacists (GPPs) commissioned by the national department of health covering 17 federations and managed centrally.
The national programme needed to provide assurance to each of the 17 federations that the 350 GP Pharmacists were working safely and competently and to the same standard framework. The line management of these teams was extremely manual, burdensome and variable form line manager to line manager. The national programme also needed to report on the impact of the GPP role at national, federation and practice level.
To enable the safe growth and retention of the GPPs across Northern Ireland and demonstrate the value of the role on patient care. To ensure that all 35 line managers were line managing their teams consistently, effectively and productively.
The national programme has been commissioning SMART since Nov 2019 and has been utilising it for supporting the development and performance management of their workforce. The tool is used in every practice across Northern Ireland and by every GPP line manager
Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) data for 2017/2018 has shown that there are expected to be 6101 people with AF in Hillingdon. However, there are only 4683 patients on GP AF registers indicating potentially 1418 undiagnosed people are not receiving the appropriate stroke prevention treatment. In 2017/2018, there were 61 strokes in patients with known AF in Hillingdon, and 41% of these patients were not anticoagulated.
The pan-London AF toolkit recommends that 80% of AF patients should be anticoagulated without exceptions. Hillingdon has fallen short of this treatment target as only 30 out of the 46 GP practices were above the 80% rate.
Capture AF is an award-winning AF detection and protection service in Hillingdon whereby community pharmacies identify people with possible AF using a KardiaMobile electrocardiogram (ECG) monitor and refer them to the Arrhythmia Care Team (ACT) at Harefield Hospital for diagnosis and treatment.
With increasing referrals from pharmacies to Harefield Hospital, the ACT identified a need to embed routine AF diagnostics and management in primary care to free up secondary care capacity for more complex, atypical AF cases.
To establish a pharmacist-led Primary Care AF Hub in Hillingdon with the aim of:
Soar Beyond and the ACT at Harefield Hospital co-developed a multi-professional competency framework, which was ratified by the North West London AF Working Group in June 2022.
In July 2022, Soar Beyond’s SMART platform will be used to baseline the competence of two primary care pharmacists against the standardised multi-professional AF competency framework. The process of competency assessment will involve onboarding the clinicians onto the SMART platform where they self-assess their competence against the framework. Two multi-professional mentors (arrythmia specialist pharmacist and GP with special interest in cardiology) will also be onboarded onto SMART. Each participant will self-assess their ‘Circle of Competence’ on SMART, which will highlight their AF training and development needs and define targets for the two primary care pharmacists in terms of competency development.
The individual competency assessments will be analysed and themed using the SMART platform capability map function and this will inform a robust curriculum to reflect the collective training needs and skill gaps. Alongside 50 case-based discussions, each clinician will receive one-to-one sessions with their mentors on SMART whereby individualised capability reviews and development plans will be generated and designed to meet individual development needs.
SMART is a web-based platform that helps healthcare organisations to:
“I was really excited to be provided a detailed description of the SMART platform. Now I understand the process for mapping an individual’s development via a competency-based assessment within a defined clinical field. This will be an integral part of ensuring baseline knowledge and skills are ascertained and thereby understanding the bespoke training needs for each individual. Designing a collective training package around these themes will ensure standardised training so that patients will be provided with the same level of care regardless of whom they see.
Using this platform will allow me to create a robust, capable and confident workforce, that will flourish because the training has been mapped and delivered in a coherent and consistent way. I am excited that I am able to support them individually and as a group in this learning journey using the SMART platform. Importantly we will be able to use the platform to demonstrate the impact of our training interventions within the wider multi-disciplinary team.”
Zainab Khanbhai
Senior cardiothoracic surgical pharmacist with a special interest in AF
Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals
Sunderland Case Study
Summary
Situation
Sunderland GP Alliance, a federation made up of six primary care networks, with a population size of 250,000 across 36 practices.
The federation had an ambition of recruiting and mobilising 50 pharmacists from a current team of six within a 6-month period. They recognised that it was not only important but essential to assure that there was a safe and standardised deployment when the pharmacists were coming from a range of different backgrounds and levels of experience.
If this was not done in a systematic and standardised way, it would lead to variation in quality of delivery of service across the federation, impacting patient care.
Task
To safely grow, develop and train the pharmacy workforce and measure the impact over the contract
Action
Result
Within 18 months of starting the process Sunderland Alliance federation developed and retained a strong and confident pharmacy team. This was seen by the:
North London Productivity Case Study
Summary
Situation
Practice based in North London (11,000 list size) faced similar problems to many -workforce crisis, with the lack of GPs and nurses, and an increase in workload due to the growing demands of the population. The practice was overwhelmed with the prescription workload and decided to take on and eventually increase the pharmacist capacity within the practice to manage this. The practice went from 0.8 WTE to 2 (made up of three pharmacists) and although the process was refined, and the pharmacists led on the prescription process the workload was still unmanageable. The GPs recognised there was a mix of capability and competence between the pharmacists, and a lack of capacity from themselves to provide adequate support to train and upskill the pharmacists. There was also a sense of the pharmacists taking too long – ‘GPs used to do this much faster’ creating anxiety and dissatisfaction within the team. The practice commissioned Soar Beyond to provide them with support and structure through the SMART platform and additional supervision support through a senior Soar Beyond pharmacist.
Task
Action
Result
“Soar Beyond has co-ordinated a proactive approach to support our practice to implement a pharmacist led programme, to develop a systematised repeat prescribing process including a proactive medication review & QOF process which has significantly reduced the entire practice prescription workload by 50% not only for the pharmacists but also our practice admin. team. We are now able to recommend and replicate a process across the PCN”
Meena Thakur, Clinical Lead, East Harrow PCN
Oxfordshire Productivity Case Study
Summary
Situation
Three practices in Didcot joined to form Didcot Primary Care Network with a patient population of over 43,000. Despite the practices being local to each other, each practice had different population needs. Although they had good informal relationships, they had no previous experience of working together in an organised way.
The practices all had:
None of the practices had any previous experience of working with a pharmacist other than CCG practice-based pharmacists
There were concerns that the PCN’s lack of experience and knowledge of background, skills, and training of a clinical pharmacist could lead to common pitfalls they were hearing from other PCNs and they didn’t want to recruit the wrong candidate for their PCN needs.
Task
The PCN needed to recruit and employ an effective pharmacist who could hit the ground running and start prescribing, running medication reviews, and delivering the income generation and clinical requirements of the directed enhanced service in an equitable way across the three practices. PCN staff sought external expertise from Soar Beyond, to accelerate the process and guide them.
Action
Soar Beyond ran a facilitated diagnostic session in July 2019 with participation across the three practices. This session helped staff to:
The PCN therefore sought a more senior pharmacist with an existing independent prescriber qualification and relevant experience to support and drive the PCN agenda, even though this would require additional ‘top-up funding’ by the practices. Staff outsourced the recruitment and support to Soar Beyond to ensure they would find the right candidate.
Soar Beyond supported the practice by:
Result
After a thorough screening and interview process, a suitably experienced candidate was interviewed in September 2019 with an offer made to start work in January 2020. The delay in start date was due to a lengthy notice period, which is typical for skilled professionals—something that should be considered when beginning recruitment.
The benefits for the PCN, practices, and pharmacist included:
The PCN has commissioned additional senior pharmacist support from Soar Beyond to provide regular coaching calls to ensure development and progress is kept on track through KPI reporting and deployment of milestones.
Conclusion
Although the whole process took 6 months, this was accelerated using external support and expertise, and prevented Didcot PCN encountering common pitfalls experienced by other PCNs, such as taking on inadequately experienced pharmacists or those that require significant support and supervision.
‘Working through the recruitment and induction process with the support of Soar Beyond has been strategically invaluable in terms of aligning my vision and values with those of the PCN Clinical Director and member practices. In my experience so far, this very alignment is crucial in effectively delivering the PCN Pharmacist role at scale.’
Ziad A Laklouk; PCN Pharmacist, Didcot PCN
South East Oxford PCN Pharmacy Team Strategy
Summary
“We requested a consultation and demo from Soar Beyond and we immediately saw how they could help. Through their support I could see we could bring the PCN together to have a shared vision of what the pharmacy team could deliver to improve workload and capacity for the clinical team but to also improve standards and patient care.
We initially commissioned them to support with recruitment and the 4D Strategy Workshops but subsequently also took on the SMART platform to enable and empower our senior pharmacist to take a lead on service delivery. With KPI monitoring and development planning modules it would support the pharmacists regardless of previous background and training ensuring a standardised approached to delivery.
We have so far successfully recruited one pharmacist and Soar Beyond are working hard to fill the other two roles to meet this years target. We are in the early days of using the platform but the initial strategy session has provided focus and we are looking forward to the second in the series.”
Dr Kathryn Brown
GP and PCN Clinical Director, South East Oxford Health Alliance PCN