Scottish Pathways Association

We are now taking bookings for our national conference, ‘Care Pathways to Promote Quality in Scotland’ which takes place on Tuesday 25th May 2010 at the Inchyra Grange Hotel in Polmont (near Edinburgh).  The event will showcase the role of clinical/care pathways in promoting improved quality of care and is free to all NHS staff in Scotland and our local authority and non-statutory organisation partners.  For more information you can now download the Conference Flyer, Programme, Booking Form and Abstract Submission Form .

To give you more information on what SPA is all about we’ve put together the first edition of the SPA Newsletter which you can download here.  Want to join us?  SPA is affiliated to the European Pathway Association so if you are a member of the EPA you will automatically be a member of SPA and won’t need to apply to join.  For anyone else interested in joining you can either fill in the SPA Membership Application Form here or by completing the Booking Form (above) for the Conference.  See you in May!

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In case you’ve been wondering, ICPUS is changing to the Scottish Pathways Association. ICPUS ran from 2001 and achieved its major goal of promoting the development of ICPs at a national level. The network is now taking a new direction in partnership with the European Pathways Association.

We’re planning a conference for 25th May 2010 to launch the new organisation. More details will follow in early 2010.

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A great deal has been happening with ICPs in Scotland in the past few months.  As many of you will know, the publication of the Quality Improvement Scotland (QIS) Standards for Mental Health ICPs has resulted in a flurry of activity over the 15 Scottish Health Board areas (the State Hospital counts as the 15th board area).

A really useful aspect of the project has been the development of a set of online information resources to support local development and implementation of ICPs.  The ICP Toolkit has been partially completed and has been released to let people have a look at it and see how it meets their requirements.  The full version should be available later this year.  Have a look at it on http://www.nhshealthquality.org/mentalhealth/toolkit/ and see what you think.  It looks like it is going to be of great help – and not only to the developers of mental health ICPs.  You can also catch up on the latest news from the QIS team in the QIS Mental Health ICP Newsletter Issue 4 .

In ICPUS news, the core management group met early in the year to take stock.  We had just passed the 7th anniversary of the creation of ICPUS and celebrated the milestone of our 1,000th delegate attending the 13th ICPUS Conference (Lanarkshire, June 2007) and felt it was time to review our aims.

The group identified the key successes of 2007:

• Production of the ICP Development Workbook
• National Mental Health ICP training sessions
• ICPUS involvement in the QIS standards

And what worked less well:

• Only one conference/meeting held in 2007
• Finance
• Time needed to organise events.

So where does our network go?  We felt there were two strands:

1. Quick Wins – identify key leads by speciality + produce a newsletter.
2. Longer Term – lobby the Scottish Government + organise a key event to promote ICPUS.

So, watch this space as the next phase of ICPUS is developed to continue meeting your needs.

Other News:

• The ICPUS Workbook is still available in our Publications section, but we are in the process of reviewing it and hope to come up with a more interactive version by the end of the year.
• The Ninth Annual Conference of Integrated Care Pathways is taking place on 24th and 25th June 2008 in London.  For more information click on our Events section and go to the link for Healthcare Events.
• The European Pathway Association (EPA) had great success with its first summer school on ICPs in Italy last year.  The second summer school is taking place on September 8 – 12, 2008 at Lake Orta in Italy.  If you want to participate please click on the EPA link here.

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Happy New Year!  We thought we would be starting the year with our conference in Aberdeen, but due to unforseen circumstances it has been postponed until a later date. We plan to hold it sometime in the spring and will keep you posted on the details.  Sorry about the delay.

On a more positive note, we saw the launch of the NHS Quality Improvement Scotland (QIS) Standards for ICPs for Mental Health at the end of December.  They are made up of four components – process standards, care standards, condition-specific care standards and service improvement standards.  A lot of this is relevant to anyone who is developing ICPs and is well worth a look.  You can obtain copies of the standards by contacting NHS QIS or you can download the document from their website at: www.nhshealthquality.org

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As you may have heard, ICPUS has a date and location for its next conference – ICPUS #15. Our colleagues in Aberdeen have volunteered to host this event which is to be held on Monday 28th January 2008. The venue is not confirmed yet, but we will let you know as soon as we hear. Better get those woolies out then! We are currently getting the programme together and would be keen to hear from anyone interested in presenting their work. We want to hear about your latest success story with ICPs or maybe you can tell us how to avoid the problem you have just solved. If you are thinking about taking part please get in touch with your local ICPUS rep or contact Patricia Kent on email, Patricia.Kent@lanarkshire.scot.nhs.uk . If you know of anyone who might be considering attending one of our conferences, tell them that we still have copies of our ‘Workbook for People Starting to Develop Integrated Care Pathways’ which we will be giving out on the day, and that might entice them along. Remember too that the Workbook is now available to download here on the website. See you in Aberdeen.

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It’s taken a bit of to’ing and fro’ing but we’ve finally got this new site up-and-running. The way we’re set up should make it much easier to update information and make announcements.

There are also more interactive features so you can use this site to quickly and easily give us feedback. Do this by clicking ‘Read more’ (or click the headline of this ‘post’) then type your ‘Comment’ in the boxes at the bottom of the ‘post’ page.

For more in-depth discussion there is the new ICPUS forum. This also has more features than the old one, including better protection from ‘spam’ messages and the option to have an avatar (a wee image to represent you each time you post a message). It will look a bit empty at first but please don’t be put off by this. The only way it will build up is by people posting messages in it – it is what you make it.

Thanks to Keith at Scotland’s Health on the Web for his help with installing this site and the forum. By the way, I’ve taken over from Corinne as ICPUS’s ‘web person’.

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