The ability for Canterbury's health professionals to work together in the care of people has become even easier today with the release of improved shared care templates.
Care planning significantly improves patient outcomes by recording and sharing the actions that the patient and their health professionals recommend when they are really unwell or towards the end of life. It provides an opportunity to share information between clinicians who are involved with a person’s care, including the individual themselves.
Two types of shared care plans used in Canterbury are Advance Care Plans and Acute Plans. These plans, previously shared in Canterbury through a separate platform called the Connected Care Management Solution (CCMS), are now incorporated into Health Connect South, accessible to primary care via HealthOne.
This means that no matter where a patient presents in the health system, everyone knows what their wishes are and what the various members of their healthcare team recommend for their care when they are acutely unwell or towards the end of life.
Acute care planning is a process that helps us safely manage patients with complex health conditions and support patient self-management. An Acute Care Plan is an editable plan that is shared across the Canterbury health system.
Advance care planning is a process of thinking about, discussing and writing down a person’s wishes about the types of medical care and treatment they want to receive in the future, in particular towards the end of their life or at a time when they are not able to make their own decisions. Advance Care Plans help guide the health care team to provide the care the patient would want if they are ever too unwell to tell us.
As well as improving accessibility, as part of this change improved Acute Plan and Advance Care Plan templates were launched that will make it even easier for our clinicians to work together in the care of people.
The improvements include easier to use templates with no compulsory fields and autosave functionality meaning that no work will be lost unecessarily. The Acute Plan template is also shorter. For Advance Care Plans the process for clinical review and publishing has not changed. Clinicians and patients can be reassured that all existing plans will be transcribed across to the new technology, so no information will be lost.
Click the image below for more information about the changes.
