You may also have received information asking your opinion on how additional education and training with regards to developing integrated care pathways in your field may help improve the patient experience whilst meeting the ever increasing demands of fiscal and policy pressure.  It would be extremely valuable to gauge how SPA can help meet your needs and assist you in meeting these ever increasing demands.  We would greatly appreciate you taking the time to complete the questionnaire attached to the email and returning it as per the instructions.  If you have not received this email contact us at info@scottishpathways.com .

We would like to emphasis that SPA is your resource and we are keen to encourage new and ongoing participation from those interested in progressing the use of clinical and care pathways aligned to improving patient experience whilst giving opportunity to ensure the most efficient use of services.  If you would like to become involved or simply find out more about SPA please do not hesitate to contact us at info@scottishpathways.com or speak to David Thomson (SPA vice chair) at 07789852482.

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!

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

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.

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

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’.