South Warwickshire’s Integrated Single Point of Access (iSPA)
Why change was needed
Integrated Health Teams (IHTs) provide skilled and compassionate nursing care and interventions for patients registered with a Warwickshire GP. The service is for those patients who are not able to attend an outpatient setting or where home would be the most appropriate place to deliver care such as palliative and end of life care and support, health education and encouraging self-management for patients with long term conditions, based on clinical decision.
Previously, these services were not integrated, so health professionals referred through a set pathway. Implementing change means the path to accessing these services is easier and more efficient for those in our community that need it.
What we did
South Warwickshire University NHS Foundation Trust (SWFT) have developed an Integrated Single Point of Access (iSPA), a telephone and email service where patients, carers and all health professionals can ring in and refer to services.
Pivotal to the success of the service has been Contact Centre Manager Riyaz Kathawala, who joined the Trust in 2018 from a banking background. Riyaz set about revolutionising the service by introducing quality measures similar to those seen in the banking sector’s contact centres and helping to build an environment promoting a sense of belonging for the team.
The iSPA has been on an incredible journey over the last 3 years and is a shining example of how when we think differently and are willing to try new things, we can overcome challenges and deliver innovative solutions.
The team now take up to 10,000 calls a month, have implemented a text messaging facility which saved between 2,000-3,000 outbound calls a month, and in 2019 were joined by the Integrated Care Coordination team (ICC) who clinically triage all of the community services who require an urgent or same day response. Both teams have been instrumental in supporting the Out of Hospital programme team with rolling out telehealth monitoring initiatives including MySense and DOCOBO, which have given SWFT the opportunity to reach service users in a different way during challenging periods.
The iSPA and ICC teams have supported the enrolment of more than 2,000 patients in care homes onto the DOCOBO app, giving care homes both more options in terms of how they connect with and quickly alert other health services, their GP, or the ambulance service if they are concerned about a resident. The iSPA is also supporting the roll out of DOCOBO at home with an initial cohort of 200 patients, enabling them to enter their own Oxygen saturation levels which are then monitored daily by the ICC team, so the correct level of interaction can be actioned by offering trusted clinical advice or allocating directly to a clinician to complete a visit if required.
What’s next?
The iSPA team are keen to continue to bring in more interactive services and systems to provide a smart and efficient service and ultimately offer an improved and differentiated way of accessing our services for our population.