National Centre for Sustainable Delivery Newsletter Spring 2023
Welcome to the Spring 2023 newsletter from the national Centre for Sustainable Delivery!
Innovation
The first Accelerated National Innovation Adoption (ANIA) value cases have been approved by the Innovation Design Authority and NHS Board Chief Executives, meaning they can now proceed to national rollout.
NHS Boards will receive further information soon about next steps before we publicly announce the launch the Digital Dermatology Referral Pathway and Diabetes Closed Loop.
Digital Dermatology Pathway
The Centre for Sustainable Delivery, in partnership with the Dermatology Artificial Intelligence (AI) Consortium, is leading on the design of a potential new national digital dermatology (skin) pathway.
Capture and inclusion of triage quality image(s) as part of the primary care referral process to secondary care dermatology services enables Consultant Dermatologists to conduct Active Clinical Referral Triage (ACRT) to determine if a face-to-face appointment is required.
The development of this end-to-end process between primary and secondary care will enable the safe, secure, effective and efficient taking and transfer of digital images across multiple national and local systems.
Diabetes Closed Loop Systems
The Centre for Sustainable Delivery, through the ANIA Collaborative, is leading on the development of a national approach to increasing access to Diabetes Closed Loop systems across NHS Scotland for people with Type 1 Diabetes.
In a Closed Loop System, an insulin pump and a continuous glucose monitor use technology to ‘talk’ to each other and adjust insulin dosing to help control blood glucose levels.
Our work involves:
- Developing the national infrastructure, guidance, training and support to allow safe and speedy transition of adults and young people living with Type 1 Diabetes from insulin pumps to closed loop systems.
- Securing funding to develop national care pathways that will allow more people living with Type 1 Diabetes to access Closed Loop technology in line with Scottish Health Technologies Group recommendations.
Click here to find out more about our Innovation work.
Modern patient pathways
Cataract blueprint
This month we published 'Improving the Delivery of Cataract Surgery in Scotland: a Blueprint for Success.'
This Blueprint builds on existing work that has already been done by the National Eyecare Work Stream to:
- Embed recommendations from Health Board Ophthalmology Peer Reviews.
- Align with the Royal College of Ophthalmologists guidelines for training lists and high volume service lists.
- Acknowledge different models of service delivery from various sites across NHS Scotland.
Our Cataract Sub-Specialty Delivery Group has been established to support Boards to implement the Blueprint. A Toolkit setting out a range of practical actions with accompanying resources will soon be available to help NHS Boards with local implementation. A measurement plan to help monitor progress and offer support is also in development.
Click here to find out more about and download the Cataract Blueprint.
Specialty Delivery Groups
We are developing dedidcated website pages for each of our clinical Specialty Delivery Groups (SDGs).
These will include information about new national pathways as they are published, including how they can be accessed and implemented.
The first SDG pages are now live:
- Dermatology – The web page is live and includes links to the Dermatology Patient Pathways application
- Ear, Nose and Throat – The web page is live and includes details of the national resources available
- Gynaecology – The web page is live and the NHS Scotland Endometriosis Pathway is now available
- Vascular Surgery – The web page is live and the NHS Scotland Chronic Limb Threatening Ischaemia Pathway and NHS Scotland Venous Leg Ulcer Pathways are now available.
Web pages for our other Specialty Delivery Groups and associated national pathway work will be published over the coming weeks.
Click here to find out more about our Modern Patient Pathways work.
Green Theatres
NHS Scotland Launch Event
This week we had our NHS Scotland launch of the National Green Theatres Programme, with more than 400 colleagues joining our MS Teams session.
The event was opened by NHS Scotland Chief Executive Caroline Lamb with Scottish Government National Clinical Director Jason Leitch delivering the keynote speech on the NHS Scotland Climate Emergency and Sustainability Strategy and why what we do in healthcare matters.
Attendees also heard presentations about the evolution of the green theatres programme from grassroots change and how we’ll be measuring rollout across NHS Scotland.
The national Centre for Sustainable Delivery has been commissioned to lead the Green Theatres Programme and support clinical involvement in environmental matters at Board level.
A key element of the Scottish Government’s Climate Emergency and Sustainability Strategy 2022 – 2026, the National Green Theatres Programme aims to reduce the carbon footprint of theatres across NHS Scotland and enable more environmentally sustainable care by:
- Assessing learning from pilot work in NHS Highland and packaging this into bundles of high impact actions.
- Supporting Boards to implement these action bundles.
- Exploring other potential high impact actions and innovations.
- Sharing learning on the wider adoption of actions to other care settings.
We'll be sending out details of the National Green Theatres Programme Actions to NHS Boards soon before we publicly launch the programme.
Click here to find out more about our National Green Theatres Programme.
NHS Scotland first in world to ‘clean up’ anaesthetic gases
A clinically-led programme to reduce the impact of hospital theatres on the environment has resulted in a volatile anaesthetic gas being removed from the NHS Scotland supply chain.
Stopping the purchase and use of desflurane is the first action for the National Green Theatres Programme. Used to put patients ‘to sleep’ during surgery, desflurane has a 14-year atmospheric ‘lifetime’ and a global warming potential 2,500 times greater than carbon dioxide.
Alert to its environmental harms, clinicians across NHS Scotland have already commenced a sustained move away from Desflurane to clinically appropriate and safe alternatives that are also better for the environment.
Click here to read more about the removal of Desflurane from the NHS Scotland supply chain.
National Elective Coordination Unit
The National Elective Coordination Unit has helped address the current planned care waiting list backlog by providing a consistent approach to national capacity assessment and allocation.
The unit is currently carrying out a national waiting list validation exercise that has resulted in over 3,000 patients being validated and just under 1,900 being treated, with 25% of patients removed from the waiting list after robust administration and clinical validation to ensure the decision is right and proper for the individual patient.
Earlier Cancer Diagnosis
Our new Detect Cancer Early campaign ‘Be the Early’ Bird has now launched.
Our new Detect Cancer Earlier campaign, ‘Be The Early Bird’, has been running across Scotland in recent weeks, targeting people aged 40+ from areas of deprivation.
The campaign reinforces the benefits of finding cancer at an earlier stage when there’s more treatment options available, a greater likelihood of living well after treatment and better news to tell family and friends.
As well as running on TV, press and radio, an interactive roadshow is making its way across the country - so far, 8 locations have been visited, prompting over 5,000 engagements with members of the public.
Keep an eye on the wee c Facebook page for more updates and news.
Click here to watch the video.
Click here to find out more about our Earlier Cancer Diagnosis work.
Website changes
We’ve recently made some changes to our website to showcase the full portfolio of work we do across NHS Scotland.
You can now find information about all of our programmes under the ‘Our Work’ tab with dedicated sections for Earlier Cancer Diagnosis, Innovation, Modern Patient Pathways, the National Elective Coordination Unit and the National Green Theatres Programme.
More information will be added to the site over the coming weeks and months, so keep checking back for all the latest information and news.
Click here to have a look through our new ‘Our Work’ website sect