SystmOne Key to Restoring
James Street Family Practice Patient Services Despite Floods
Imagine the scene… a busy day ahead, surgery appointments fully booked,
clinics planned, patient home visits arranged and from the surgery window
staff can be seen arriving for work… and the rain had not stopped for
hours.
Dr Simon Topham had been on site at James Street Family Practice since 07.30
and by 08.30 was becoming increasingly worried that the water level outside the
practice was beginning to rise at a phenomenal rate... three feet within the
past hour to be precise!
As the practice is situated at the side of the river which runs through the
town, you can imagine what was going through everyone’s mind… However,
as Simon explained “it has been over fifty years since Louth experienced
any flooding, and although flood alerts had been received that morning, we
still did not expect that it would affect us on site at the practice”.
However, as the water had risen so fast and was unexpectedly high, staff were
asked to prepare for evacuation. Simon described the details of events; “It
all happened so quickly… before we knew it the water was six inches from
the building, if we had waited any longer the water would have been through the
surgery door; we did not even have time to print off our patient lists for the
morning, our priorities were to ensure that services such as the electricity
supply were disconnected and that everyone was out of the practice and moved
to a safe place as soon as possible.”
The safety of Louth County Hospital was very much welcomed by James Street staff;
Jilly Hawdin (LPCT- Interim Administrator out of hours service - OOH) was on
hand to help Drs Topham, Mowatt, Pike and Ko to resume their patient services
at the hospital. With thanks to Jilly and to TPP SystmOne, James Street patient
services were ‘back up and running’ within 30 minutes of being on
site at the hospital, which was an incredible achievement! This was only possible
because TPP SystmOne had recently been installed at the hospital A&E department
to enable local SystmOne GPs to have access to the records of their own patients
outside normal surgery hours.
TPP SystmOne’s software stores GP data remotely (off site) in data warehouses,
which can be accessed by authorised users, via the NHS N3 network (secure NHS
computer network). This is one of the major benefits of the new NHS computer
system. SystmOne practices can be sure that their data will be sent to a secure
data centre at all times, and the practice staff can gain access to it whenever
they need to, whatever the weather!!!
Dr Topham confirmed that within half an hour of arrival at the local hospital,
all the Drs were able to log-on to their practice data, and start contacting
their patients. Radio 4, 5Live and Lincs FM also supported the practice to inform
their patients that services were being resumed at Louth County Hospital. Within
an hour of arrival at Louth County Hospital, full GP services had been restored,
the GPs had full access to their patients' records, pathology results, appointments
etc… All GPs at the practice said that they would have been completely ‘scuppered’ without
SystmOne.
In the past, we know that damage from severe weather has left practices with
the irreplaceable loss of data if their servers had been affected, meaning that
both GPs and their patients had to create a whole new record after such disasters.
The loss of such vital information can impact severely upon patient care delivery,
but one great benefit of the practice’s recent switch to TPP SystmOne (National
System) meant that there was no loss of practice data, or patient services!
TPP would like to thank Tina and the staff at James Street for sharing
their experiences in this way.
