Clinicians and staff from practices in the Primary Care Networks (PCNs) of Copeland, Workington, Keswick and Solway, Cockermouth and Maryport recently attended a North Cumbria Cancer Conference ran by North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB) and in collaboration with Northern Cancer Alliance.
The event took place on the afternoon of Thursday 16 May 2024 as part of Protected Learning Time (PLT) which is very important to surgeries as it allows practitioners and staff to keep up to date with best practice to help continuously improve their patient care and services.
Dr Helen Horton, Clinical Lead (North Cumbria) for North East and North Cumbria ICB explained: "Over the year general practice colleagues within primary care have six protected learning afternoons which means that we close surgeries for the whole afternoon so that all of our teams can engage in education and development.
"It's really important that we have this time, even though I know it can sometimes can be quite frustrating for patients. But this allows our teams to get together, to keep up to date, to develop services, to develop local knowledge and basically to improve clinical care that we provide for North Cumbrian patients.
"This was a focused cancer event so we could learn about some of the issues we have in regards to cancer care at the moment and work together in our primary care networks and practices to develop our systems and improve the quality of care that we give to our cancer patients.
"Education is a real priority for the Integrated Care Board because we understand that giving clinicians time out to educate and develop their knowledge leads to improved patient care and better satisfaction."
The conference featured both clinical and non-clinical staff so the learning and development was across the teams in surgeries.
Sam Gargett, Project Manager for Primary Care Services North Cumbria explained: "We obviously were looking at the clinical pathways but we've also brought together our operational teams from our practices, which is absolutely invaluable.
"There's massive value in having that feedback from our Medical Secretaries, Coders and Admin Support Teams as they are the ones who are really able to tell us what happens at referral point. We're also joined by a colleague from Secondary Care, we've been working with both the lab at North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust (NCIC) and also with our contact centre. All of this means we can look at the whole process at a granular level and make sure that patient care is improved across North Cumbria at all levels.
"Each thing that we do in primary care is actually very complex, and each has a moving part. Without knowing how each part works we can't look at the overall picture. To have everyone, both operational and clinical in the same room, we're able to really find out if there is anything we need to improve on, what's working really well. We have a lot of practices out there that are working really well and to be able to share that good news and good practice is again invaluable."
Dr Cherryl Timothy-Antoine, Cancer Lead (North Cumbria) for North East and North Cumbria ICB said: "We're getting together to look at our processes and pathways but also to glean new information by speaking together with colleagues.
"There's nothing ever static, things are always changing, there's always new pathways being introduced and new ways to do things. The event also gives us the time to get together to talk about our own Primary Care Network plans. The PCNs who didn't attend today's conference will have an event like this during Protected Learning Time in September to have their turn."
The conference featured a number of speakers including Dr Shaun Lackey and Dr Katie Elliott from the Northern Cancer Alliance and Vicky Lamonby, who is a lung cancer specialist nurse from NCIC.
Joel Vilchez, PCN Cancer Engagement Lead for North Cumbria from Primary Care Services North Cumbria said: "It's good to have the collaboration of the Northern Cancer Alliance with Shaun and Katie. We also have Hannah Reeson from NCIC to give her views on the struggles within secondary care and share their perspective. This means we can all learn and share best practice.
"A big thank you also goes to Fiona Anderson who is the Cancer Delivery Lead (Timely Presentation & Primary Care) who was also working with other staff who couldn't attend the conference in person through a further online meeting option."
"My role as a cancer engagement lead is to look at the overall eight Primary Care Networks with the practices and the GP Leads, in partnership with secondary care and the cancer community champions, with a view to improve screening rates in North Cumbria."
Dr Shaun Lackey, Clinical Lead from Northern Cancer Alliance explained his presentation at the conference explaining: "I've been a GP for 20 years and was talking about early diagnoses in cancer and teledermatology. One of the key messages that we wanted to get across is how important it is to capture cancer early.
The biggest thing that makes a difference, when people are unfortunate enough to have a cancer diagnosis, it's this early diagnosis and provide a bit of hope from the patient and families perspective because we know the survival rates are so significantly different for early stage cancer to late stage. We're talking about a difference of 90% of people have a 5 year survival, down to 5% of people at late stage cancers. So we know we can do it and improve that and hoping to make such a difference to our patients."
A further Cancer Training Conference for the other GP surgeries in North Cumbria is planned to take place during the Protected Learning Time in September to ensure this learning and development is achieved across the whole North Cumbria NHS area.
