Information for healthcare providers
As researchers and GPs, the RECAP project team is aware of the challenges that primary care clinicians have encountered in the management of patients during the Covid19 pandemic. Remote consultations have become the norm, and, with their pros and cons, they are still the safest way to assess patients in a primary care setting. While guidelines to assist GPs in the remote consultation of Covid-19 patients have been provided, these patients may present with myriad of symptoms whose severity may increase unexpectedly, which added to the clinical uncertainty GPs have had to deal with for the past months.
The RECAP project seeks to assist primary care clinicians in the assessment and management of Covid-19 patients by providing an objective warning score to enable the early identification of patients that may need urgent escalation of care. We are asking primary care practices to collaborate with us in developing this tool. As primary care provider, your participation would involve the use of an enhanced Covid-19 assessment template, deployed through EMIS, SystmOne or similar, when a patient with suspected or diagnosed Covid-19 seeks medical attention in your practice. Following this template will be also beneficial for you to assess and record symptoms and signs of these complicated patients in a systematic and transparent way, which could mitigate some of the uncertainty faced during the remote consultation without an increase in consultation time.
Once the data is collected, it will be pseudo-anonymised and linked to hospital data through North West London WSIC via iCARE and RCGP Research Surveillance Centre for analysis. Therefore, if your work in North West London, NHS 111 Covid Clinical Assessment Service (CCAS) or your practice is part of RSC network, you are invited to take part in the RECAP project. If you would like to participate but either are not based in North West London, CCAS or do not belong to the RSC network, you can find more information on the RSC network and on how to join, here.
Once you have agreed to participate, you will be sent information on how to install the electronic template in your electronic health records system. You can access a webinar explaining the use of the template in EMIS here. Some features of the template shown in the webinar have now been updated, but the aspects discussed in the questions and answers session of the webinar are relevant. Moreover, we have created a FAQs form for your guidance.
Regardless your participation, we would also like to encourage you to join the discussion in the “National Deterioration Forum” (within the “Future NHS Collaboration Forum”), a platform where we can all share challenges or drawbacks in Covid-19 patients’ assessment and management. The RECAP score is underdevelopment and will be improved with GPs inputs and quantitative analyses of data collected. The main goal is improving patient outcomes, but it will also assist primary care clinicians in their clinical duties by standardising assessment and reporting of Covid-19 patients in first instance and providing a validated tool to assist their treatment and management once the tool is finalised.
For any additional queries or expressions of interest, please contact:
- Dr Ana Belen Espinosa-Gonzalez, contact for North West London CCG practices
- Laiba Husain, contact for Oxfordshire CCG / CRN Thames Valley and South Midlands practices
- Mr Jack Macartney , contact for RCGP Research and Surveillance Centre network practices