Implementing virtual reviews to support prostate cancer patients
A use case story from East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust
“The online portal My Health and Care Record has proved an innovative way of caring for and supporting prostate cancer patients post treatment, as well as created efficiencies for our team”, says Izabela Przyczyna, Oncology Co-ordinator, Eastbourne District General Hospital/Conquest Hospital.
I am part of a team that looks after patients with prostate cancer post radiotherapy and radical treatment. Patients follow a strictly selected criteria and those who are doing very well in their cancer are placed onto virtual reviews under a Self –Supported Management Programme.
Our approach empowers patients to look after themselves, reduces anxiety and encourages patients to ask their GP or medical teams looking after them for help, fulfilling at the same time the NHS patient centred care vision.
Using My Health and Care Record (MHCR) - powered by Patients Know Best - has many benefits to offer, not only for patients, but also to clinical teams.
"Since we started the Self-Supported Management programme for prostate patients in September 2022 we noted that 57% of all our patients are actively engaging with MHCR. Also using MHCR for our virtual reviews has halved the clinical time that is required for each patient."
Digitising processes has brought about many benefits such as reduced nurse time with each patient, reduced phone calls, enabled consistency in reviews and clinic letters, improved capacity in clinics and created extra capacity for urgent cases and patients. Overall our service has become more efficient.
We encourage all our patients to use MHCR. The staff use MHCR to manage patients, who are willing to engage with us this way. For patients who are unable to engage with MHCR for a variety of reasons, we manage these as we always have done.
This is the first virtual clinic running in ESHT and I am very proud to be part of it. I am the first and main point of contact for all patients selected to the programme and I fully administrate virtual reviews of these patients. This is also the first time the Trust is using MHCR to communicate with patients in this innovative way. There are other teams and departments wanting to explore the suitability of using it for similar patient engagement. We already have given some lectures on virtual reviews to other teams in the Trust who would like to follow our steps. We have also held conferences with other trusts on how effective and efficient it is to use MHCR to communicate with patients as healthcare professionals. We incorporate learning from using MHCR and we are in constant contact with our MHCR team to improve their service by giving them ideas about new services to be implemented in MHCR, as we believe this is the future of patient engagement. We believe that healthcare professionals’ engagement and an easy registration process would help to engage even more people to use MHCR. More variety of services, connection with GP practices, doctor appointments, and the messaging service would definitely help to engage the younger generation to use MHCR.
Outcomes and Learnings
An annual audit of the self-supported management programme was undertaken covering the period between 03/11/2022 – 12/10/2023. In over a year we have reviewed, in the virtual prostate clinic, 635 patients in total from which 359 used PKB to communicate with us and to fill in symptoms assessment questionnaires which were required for their reviews. Some of our patients have been reviewed twice in this period and others only once as we are reviewing patients on a 6 months basis and selection of patients to this programme is still ongoing.
Over this time we recognised that 57% of patients selected to the project have been engaging with PKB to communicate with the uro-oncology team, complete questionnaires and communicate with us with any queries related to their virtual reviews.
The virtual review for each patient now takes around 5 – 10 minutes max compared to 20 minutes for a telephone review. (Duration of review depends somewhat on the complexity of the patient).
If we take the higher end of the time taken of 10 minutes on each virtual review, overall we saved over 105 hours of nurse specialist time using virtual reviews (this calculates to 315 telephone slots saved annually) and by using MHCR around 60 hours annually which is 180 telephone slots. As well as increased patient satisfaction, these savings have enabled our specialist nurses to be redeployed to different clinical activities within the department.
Benefits we have realised from this programme include:
- Reduced clinical time spent on reviewing each patient from 20 minutes to 10 minutes
- Digitising the process reduces nurse time engagement with each patient, improves capacity in clinics and provides a more efficient service to both the clinicians and patients.
- Digital communication with patients reduces phone calls to nurses
- Instant messaging service with uro-oncology team via MHCR
- Consistency in reviews and clinic letters
- Template letters introduced - reduced nurse time in dictating clinic letters
- Increased room capacity/ outpatients team capacity – reviewing 20 patients per clinic virtually.
My Health and Care Record is an interactive online health record available on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop to adults in Sussex. Medical information is available to users and their healthcare team, including test results, appointments, discharge letters, care plans, medications. A journal, symptom tracker and resource library also encourage users to take an increased role in monitoring their own health and wellbeing.
You can access My Health and Care Record, a platform powered by Patients Know Best, using NHS login or directly via this login page.
