- GlaxoSmithKline UK
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Videos
Video 1 – At GSK we take Joint Working very seriously and believe that this is increasingly the way GSK will be working together with the NHS. This is what Simon Jose; our General Manager has to say about it.
Video 2 – Take a closer look at the award-winning Joint Working project between StHealth PBC Consortium and GSK from the view of patients, the NHS and GSK.
Video 3 – Dr William Arnett, Clinical Lead for Wearside PBC Consortium shares early outcomes from the Wearside / GSK COPD Joint Working Project and his personal thoughts and reflections on the project.
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Hello, my name is Simon Jose and I'm the General Manager of GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceuticals here in the UK. I would like to just take a couple of minutes to talk to you a little bit about my views of joint working between GSK and the NHS.
I think we all recognise that between the NHS and GSK and in the healthcare environment in which we are working in at the moment, we face challenges around trying to improve the quality of care in an ever ageing population, and at the moment where we have a particularly cost constrained environment in which we are all operating in.
So for me Joint Working between the NHS and GlaxoSmithKline is a real opportunity right now and has never ever been more important. There is a real opportunity for us to bring together our combined skills and resources and when put together I think can make a real benefit for the patients that we work with.
With expertise in a number of disease areas, GSK is much more than just a supplier of medicines. We really want to take our relationship with the NHS to a new level and to really unlock our consultative and problem solving skills and our resources to create solutions that can really start to benefit the patients that we serve.
We are fully supportive of the Department of Health guidelines for Joint Working which offers a transparent framework for a business-business relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the NHS. We at GlaxoSmithKline have started to work already with a number of PCTs and commissioning groups, putting Joint Working programmes together where we have really started to see tangible benefits to the patients in your communities.
So, if you're interested in finding out more about what Joint Working with GlaxoSmithKline could mean to you, your economy and the patients in your communities then please either contact your Local Account Manager or email us at Joint.Working@gsk.com
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Karen Fox
Integrated Healthcare Manager, GSK
The whole project started because COPD is a priority area for NHS Halton and St Helens. On two points, ‘cause firstly they have really high smoking rates and also because of their history of industry. They have glass and a history of mining here in Halton and St Helens.
Sharon Greenwood
Practice Manager – Garswood Surgery & Board Manager of StHealth Consortium
COPD is a debilitating lung disease. There's a high prevalence of COPD in St Helens caused by smoking and the heavy industry that's in the area. StHealth is the St Helens Health Practice Based Commissioning Consortium. Our COPD project developed from the fact that there was 50% greater admissions rate in St Helens than the national average. Costing StHealth around about a million pounds. And the nurses weren't treating to NICE standards generally, consistently across the patch. So we decided to address this through the project and now the nurses have got a lot more confidence in when to refer to secondary care and the care level across the whole patch is far more consistent.
Katie Litton
Practice Nurse – Central Surgery
Yes, we were initially given a training schedule which included various education sessions over half a day a month for the past year or so. And these education sessions were run by a specialist nurse trainer, which included various things really. It included asthma, differential diagnosis, spyrometry interpretation, and how to perform a more in-depth COPD review for our patients.
Becky Mather
Respiratory Care Associate, GSK
Ok, so Katie, as you know, we've been using POINTS which is a patient outcome information service. And we've been using that to track the progress of how the practice have been doing with your COPD reviews. Have you found it that it's something useful for you to be using?
Katie Litton
Yeah, erm, I find that it's helped me as a practice nurse and as practice to focus on improving patient care.
Tracey Peet
Practice Nurse – Garswood Surgery
This is the COPD 6 machine. And we're using it to easily and quickly identify anybody with breathing problems. They breathe into it three times. And the digital display just tells us whether anybody's breathing is lower than expected.
Becky Mather
So being able to evaluate patients' experience and to have a real understanding of how patients were feeling was really key for us during the project, so we commissioned to have a patient survey conducted. Two key elements… there were two key elements for this, one of which was to really understand how the patients were feeling. One of the reported outcomes that we've had so far is that 50% of the patients have reported that they understand their condition a lot more. Secondly, it allows us to continuously evaluate the project in order to deliver better outcomes every time.
Katie Litton
And I feel like I have more confidence in performing a high-quality nursing care review for the patients with COPD. And I feel like I can help the patients now, live with the disease rather than suffer with it.
Sharon Greenwood
[It's] been a lot better for the patients. They're now being managed to NICE standards. They're getting NICE standard quality reviews. They understand their medications better. They are able to self-manage in the community better. If they are exacerbating they know what to do, which helps to keep them out of hospital, so they don't panic.
Katie Litton
And I feel like I have more confidence in performing a high-quality nursing care review for the patients with COPD. And I feel like I can help the patients now, live with the disease rather than suffer with it.
Sharon Greenwood
[It's] been a lot better for the patients. They're now being managed to NICE standards. They're getting NICE standard quality reviews. They understand their medications better. They are able to self-manage in the community better. If they are exacerbating they know what to do, which helps to keep them out of hospital, so they don't panic.
Karen Fox
What's happening now is that patients are getting a better standard of care no matter which practice they attend. And also an improved patient experience.
Sharon Greenwood
This has been a truly joint working project in every sense of the term. There's been openness and honesty between ourselves, that's the PBC consortium StHealth, the PCT Halton St Helens and GSK. There's been a huge amount of trust built up between us and, as far as I'm concerned, the two hundred and ninety thousand pounds that's been spent on this project, on a 50/50 basis, has been money well spent.
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Hello I’m Bill Arnett, a GP in Sunderland. I’ve been working on this project alongside GSK with our commissioning group for the last two years. In Sunderland we have a population of COPD sufferers because of our mining and shipping industries, as well as the smoking that occurs within our population. Within our own group, in Wearside, this came to a total of approximately 2,800 COPD patients. Of those COPD patients, they are 51% more likely to be admitted into hospital than elsewhere in the UK. In 2007 and 8, the COPD admissions came to approximately 1.1 million pounds, which is a significant amount.
The three main objectives are for; patients, for the NHS or our practice, and then of course with our joint working partner GSK. With the patients first of all what we need to do is improve our diagnosis and our registers for those patients and making sure that we’ve identified them. Second would be really to make sure that we’re managing them appropriately and adhering to the NICE guidelines, and third is really empowering the patients to self-manage their own disease. The objectives for the NHS would be to ensure that our healthcare professionals, primarily our GPs, are knowledgeable about the COPD and have sufficient training really to carry forward the care for their patients. Secondly, really to ensure that they’re aware of the NICE guidelines and to make sure that they’re adhering to those guidelines and management with patients, and I think more importantly really that GPs or the NHS have the resources available to do that work for their patients. The GSK objectives are really to ensure that the GPs are prescribing to NICE guidelines and using the appropriate respiratory medications. Secondly, I think it was to have the GPs acknowledge the extents of skills and experience that GSK has and the resource potential that they could offer to the GPs, and thirdly to demonstrate GSK’s alignment to the QIPP agenda.
I’d like to speak really about what we did within our own practice and speak from my own personal experience about this project. We needed an approach really that we could replicate amongst all of the practices, so first of all we needed some guidelines, and that of course would be the NICE guidelines for COPD. Secondly really was to use a patient order tool in order to identify those patients that we needed to seek out. Thirdly was to identify the individual practice needs for ourselves that included both GP and nurse spirometry training as well as identify the resources that we needed to implement the changes we needed in our practice. Of course there was an incentive through the commissioning group’s own funding scheme and that was to ensure that all the practices could manage their own action plans as well as to ensure that patient surveys were being completed.
We had some very good outcomes both for GPs and patients alike. For our patients, we actually managed to increase patient review by 30%, which I think everybody would agree was a significant increase; we started off at roughly 44% and increased that to 74% and I think that’s very crucial in being able to help patients and manage their disease. For the healthcare community we saw a very significant reduction in hospital admissions, this came to 12% and that was really just with our preliminary data, and we’re expecting that to increase further as time goes on. We’ve had a successful relationship between our commissioning group and GSK and it’s something that we do need to continue, and our plans really now are to roll this project out throughout the entirety of Sunderland.
I think the next steps really are to carry on with a review of our patients and identify those that don’t have access to the primary care services. Of course, there’s a lot of debate about looking at the undiagnosed millions but I think first we need to approach the patients that we already know about but don’t often see.
The main benefit for patients is that they’re being regularly reviewed and now have a better understanding, and control of their own COPD.
The biggest challenge that we’ve had so far is really the engagement with the practices. I think that our practice managers, as any GP would understand, like to rule us with an iron fist and of course their engagement did help with this project.
I think the main thing that GSK brought to our project was that they enabled our group to be focussed. GPs have so much going on in their own practices, auditing so many projects, that GSK helped keep that focus and kept us on track and hopefully it enables us to continue the review with that project.
The main benefit in this working relationship was really the resources that we had available to us via the pharma industry and that’s something traditionally we didn’t have access to, and primarily it had been funding, but as any GP practice could appreciate, that funding really isn’t the answer when its resources that are crucial.
Now with our new world order of GP consortia, I think it’s important really that these relationships in joint working continue even further, the resources that we have at our disposal in the NHS are quite limited, and I think the pharma industry can add to that resource pool, especially owing to the time consideration that we have for going forward with path finder status in the GP consortia.
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