There are lots of steps we can take to stay on top of our health, but it can be challenging to remember everything with our busy lives. This quarter, the EMPHN digital health and general practice teams have been working with general practices across the EMPHN catchment to boost numbers in cervical screenings and work for better health outcomes for women.
In addition to benefiting the health of their community, the team at Doreen Total Health Care Clinic also managed to win themselves a delicious morning tea for their hard work in increasing their cervical screening of eligible women by 9%.
After Practice Nurse, Rupa Solanki attended the Quality Improvement webinar on Cervical Screening back in August 2022, the clinic then took several steps to make improvements. They started by changing their software from Medinet to Best Practice, which allowed them to have POLAR software installed. POLAR (Population Level Analysis & Reporting) software provides meaningful analysis of patient data and enabled the clinic to search for women who were due for cervical screening. The software connects to the National Cancer Screening Register to update patient files and makes it easier for the clinic to send reminders through SMS/letters to eligible women. The clinic also ensured that their female GP was available to assist screening women.
Although the changing software was daunting at first, Rupa commented that she, “Didn’t know it could be so easy!” The new system has allowed the dedicated team to concentrate on improving health outcomes in their community and focus on patient-centred care.
Dr John Abraham, Bhavna Singh and Nurse Rupa Solanki were joined by Barb Repcen from the Digital Health team and Julie Allardice from the General Practice support team.