Osteoporosis and Fracture Liaison Service (FLS) lead nurse practitioner at Yeovil District Hospital Clare Cockill is an enthusiastic user of the Dorset Care Record.
Clare, who has practised at Yeovil since 2006, said that in an average year Yeovil FLS deals with around 1500 new patients with fragility fractures, many of them elderly due to the demographic nature of the population in north Dorset and south Somerset.
In the past, the hospital has been very reliant on sending out questionnaires to patients to help gather patient information, which is then fed into two national audits to help improve the care fragility fracture patients.
But since Yeovil Hospital was given access to the Dorset Care Record (DCR) in spring 2020 as part of the response to the Covid pandemic Clare and her team have been able to find much of this through the electronic record system: “We can now see quite a lot of the information we need on the GP system now before contacting the patient. We can corroborate, update or clarify existing information that we have about the patient before making contact with them. This is particularly useful when investigations and appointments are carried out at other hospitals such as Salisbury when we would not have access to these otherwise”.
“We can see what has happened from a previous letter requesting an action so that when we do contact patients, we have gathered the most up to date information we can to make the contact more efficient and pertinent.
“We can check what medications and dose are prescribed. We can also see how long the drug has been prescribed for and whether previous courses have been given. I can check blood results, x-ray reports and whether any referral for a condition/result has been made.
The addition of community feeds from Dorset HealthCare over the winter has also provided further useful support for Clare and her colleagues.
“It has been very helpful to see recent patient correspondence when this has been available and it is very useful to see the rehab team notes for mobility and other assessments. It is also useful to see what hospital appointments have happened to help inform us about the patient’s journey”.
“Recent bone density reports are now appearing on the DCR and that is very helpful for us. It would also be helpful to see height, weight, alcohol and smoking status, as well as all external letters to the practice about the patient (some have appeared recently)” she added.
Clare summarised by saying that the DCR means that patients are now able to receive a more appropriate and efficient response from the service without the patient having to repeatedly answer the same questions from different teams. “Patients expect that we can all see their healthcare information and they are surprised when we cannot”.
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