North ICP Clinical Guidelines

This page was updated on 12 September 2022, please note that this page will no longer be updated.


The North Integrated Care Partnership (ICP) Clinical Guidelines and information project is funded by the AHSN NENC and supported by the ICS Digital Workstream. The project aims to standardise the availability of clinical guidelines and information in Primary Care to enable front line staff to quickly access and find the information they need.

The AHSN NENC has brought together healthcare organisations within the North ICP, and the project has engagement and representation from stakeholders in:

  • Newcastle Gateshead CCG
  • North Tyneside CCG
  • Northumberland CCG
  • The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
  • Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust
  • Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
  • Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne & Wear NHS Foundation Trust
  • North East Ambulance Service
  • Northern Cancer Alliance
  • Area Prescribing Committee
  • Local Medical Committee
  • GP Federations

Project Aims

The North ICP Clinical Guidelines and Information Project aims to standardise the availability of clinical guidelines and information across the three local CCGs, Newcastle/Gateshead, North Tyneside and Northumberland, and share to primary care via an established online platform, Agilio TeamNet.

Background

The project originated from a recognition that there was no single, central source of information for Primary Care staff to access clinical information and guidelines – organisations, networks and providers have their own websites and publications. This can make it difficult to find the information that you need, when you need it

Project Scope

To support the scoping of this work, in May 2019, the AHSN NENC provided funding for Dr Tom Zamoyski, Dr Catherine Lewis and Dr Helen Ryan to develop a project brief to address this issue, and begin the foundation work which:

  • confirmed that there is no single, central source of information – organisations and providers have their own websites and publications.
  • brought together healthcare partners in agreement to support an approach to enable front line out of hospital staff to access guidelines and clinical information from one place.

Now with a new project team in place, a new clinical lead and clinical editors, the project aims to continue to locate information and guidelines from secondary care, and other services, and upload to the North ICP Clinical Support page on Agilio Teamnet.

Project Team

The project team is managed by Project Manager Laura Spence, and supported by Programme Support Officer Hannah Healer who both work for NECS. Dr Sarah Louden is the teams Clinical lead, a local GP.

Dr Mark Dornan is the Senior Responsible Officer (SRO) for this project.  We have a team of GP Clinical Editors who are collating local clinical information to add to Teamnet.

Stakeholder Group

The Governance Group has been re-named the Stakeholder Group. It includes representatives from the stakeholders listed. The group meets quarterly to aid progress of the project.

Operational Group

The Operational Group includes the Project Team and representatives from Newcastle, Gateshead, North Tyneside and Northumberland CCG. They assist and direct the project team to ensure we are delivering the projects aims.If you have any queries about the North ICP Clinical Guidelines, please email [email protected]

Progress to date

Over the past 18 months we have made great progress thanks to the hard work of the project team. We have populated 80 Speciality Sections (lozenges) of Teamnet with clinical information and guidelines which can be used by staff working in primary care to help guide patient management decisions. We are working with stakeholders from across the North ICP to identify further clinical information to ensure continued development of the lozenges.

All GP practices across the North ICP have access to Teamnet and are able to benefit from this centrally located information portal. The project team are working with regional clinical leads from all health sectors to identify guidelines for publication into the TeamNet portal.

Collaborative working

The team are working closely with the Clinical Digital Resource Collaborative (CDRC) to align active/prospective work with their priorities.

Shared learning

To ensure the project benefits from existing learning and guidance, the team are working closely with project leads from Central ICP, South Tyneside and North Cumbria who have successfully implemented their own models of sharing in TeamNet and Health Pathways over the last five years.

Bi monthly meetings are held with the leads for the other guideline projects across NENC to ensure shared knowledge and best practice, and to support each other by not duplicating work unnecessarily.