With the End of Life Monitoring and Assessment tool, GPs can be notified of care home residents' end of life wishes.An app-like tool that has the potential to change the culture around advanced plans for frail and older people in care homes has been developed in Trafford, Greater Manchester.
The End of Life Monitoring and Assessment (Elma) tool allows care homes to electronically send a resident's advanced plan – a statement of their end of life wishes – via a handheld device direct to the individual's GP computer system. The plan, which is Read-coded and compatible with the practice system, can then be accessed around the clock by other NHS staff from ambulance teams to A&E doctors and community nurses.
It means that for the first time care home staff can directly share their knowledge about a resident with the wider NHS. Crucially, Elma also allows GPs and other NHS staff to be kept up-to-date with the advanced plan of an older person living in the residential care system whom they may rarely see and may be little known to them.
With the resident's consent, Elma can also be accessed by their family or friends using a secure two-factor authentication. Uniquely, Elma has also been designed to be used as an experiential training tool by care home staff to teach them how to create and develop an advanced plan with a resident.
Before Elma was introduced, care homes that did promote advanced plans for residents used paper versions, which then had to be faxed to the GP surgery. The time-consuming process was open to error and the information the plans held was often inconsistent, says physiotherapist Louise Rogerson, director of service development at Intelesant – the company behind Elma.
Because of Elma, it is hoped that eventually all people living in Trafford – not just care home residents – will have an advanced plan, which can be securely accessed by healthcare professionals and the individual's family. Rogerson said: "Any of us who have an advanced plan can use this system; it's not just for people in the last years of their life, it's for anybody who wants an advanced plan."
Additional coded data about the resident, which has been added by the care home staff can also be accessed via Elma by healthcare professionals, if necessary. That data includes latest information about a resident's usual level of consciousness; their mobility; their diet and their weight.
Rogerson says: "These are key indicators about how well a patient is, about how frail they are, and was something which the doctors in A&E said would be useful. It's the kind of information which the care home staff would have."
The electronic tool, developed by Intelesant, Trafford clinical commissioning group and the local hospice, has already been used by one local care home and is in the process of being rolled out to another nine.
The data Elma captures also reflects that required by the electronic palliative care co-ordination system, which is part of the national end of life care programme in England.
This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to receive regular emails and exclusive offers.
No comments:
Post a Comment