IMPRESS (IMProving and Integrating RESpiratory Services in the NHS)
A collaboration between British Thoracic Society (BTS) and General Practice Airways Group (GPIAG).
Our aim is to drive high quality patient-centred care across the traditional boundaries of secondary and primary care, integrating and improving the services for people with respiratory disease. We are providing, we hope, a role model for how to do it, by working collaboratively with managers, nurses, doctors and lay representation across primary and secondary care. Our first and extremely popular publication is the Jargon Buster which seeks to explain "the new NHS" to clinicians and others, giving respiratory examples. It is available online where it is regularly updated.
We have now published as free downloadable publications
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Best practice guidance on developing a respiratory service specification including a sample specification for COPD
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Delivering Respiratory Care Closer to Home - giving examples of how to make the shift from traditional outpatient care
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Commissioning a community COPD service - a guide to procurement, based on a case study in Somerset PCT including do's and don'ts for clinicians, commissioners and bidders
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A Vision for Respiratory Care - Our response to Lord Darzi.
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Guide to respiratory coding - essential reading for clinicians and coders
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Workforce standards - key competences and standards for the respiratory workforce. This asks eight questions of commissioners and offers 5 standards.
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Consultant Physicians in Integrated Respiratory Care - making the case for a new role
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Principles, Definitions & Standards for Pulmonary Rehabilitation
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British Thoracic Society statement on criteria for specialist referral
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A model referral letter
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Specification for sleep services - to coincide with the publication on 26 March 2008 of the NICE Health Technology Appraisal on continuous positive airways pressure CPAP
We have made detailed submissions to the PbR team on coding and tariff unbundling issues to support better commissioning of respiratory care. There is a long lead time to implementation, but we are arguing for respiratory hospital at home to be a priority for an unbundled tariff given the robust evidence base for its effectiveness.
As part of this, we want to draw commissioners attention to the possibilities of more sophisticated contracting, such as incentivising the appropriate use of telephone consultations as part of the shift of outpatient care.
We have also become aware of the lack of convergence between the evidence bases used by some commissioners, and that used by clinicians for decision-making. We are therefore reviewing how best to ensure that evidence from British Thoracic Society and General Practice Airways Group conferences and publications gets into the domain of managers and commissioners. Equally, we are scanning the NHS websites for information about new service models in respiratory care, to ensure that the evidence from these is shared across the clinical community.
For more information on any of these, please see our redesigned website.
IMPRESS has now made available free webcasts of the presentations at its highly successful first conference Commissioning World Class Services for Patients With Respiratory Disease. Click here to the webcasts.
Network website: www.impressresp.com
Network contact: Siân Williams, sian.health@googlemail.com