CHART used to reduce smoking
and obesity related illness
Kent 2009
Tried and tested CHART queries are being used to help practices to report the rates of smoking and obesity in West Kent Primary Care Trust with the help of Primary Care Information Manager Habiba Rawoof and Yvette Negus.
Staff at the PCT have encouraged practices to use the PRIMIS+ CHART data analysis tool to extract, process and send the data required by the Department of Health to the PCT.
The decision to promote the use of the ‘Local Delivery Plan (LDP) Smoking and Obesity' queries was taken after just 19 of 105 practices returned the necessary data in the first quarter of 2008/09.
Initially practice staff needed a lot of encouragement to convince them to start reporting their data, but they were keen to continue reporting when they saw how easy it was to use CHART and discovered what was done with the data they submitted.
Habiba said: "It was important to point out the benefits of running these queries, and to spend time showing the practice manager how they could use the extracted data themselves.
'We also explained that their submissions were vital to help the PCT provide better services to the patients where it is needed most.'
Habiba and Yvette have also credited the ease of running CHART queries and the relationships built up between practice staff and facilitators as "absolutely key" for the four-fold increase in reporting which the PCT achieved by the final quarter of 2008/09.
Number of practices who returned data:
|
Quarter 1
|
2008/09
|
19
|
|
Quarter 2
|
2008/09
|
41
|
|
Quarter 3
|
2008/09
|
74
|
|
Quarter 4
|
2008/09
|
81
|
Yvette said: 'Previously we used non-CHART MIQUEST queries, which practice staff did not find easy to use. Our team believes in training practice staff to run their own queries. We do support them; however our aim is to empower the practices. It is much easier to use CHART.'
Following the success of the project to improve reporting, Marina Buswell, Corporate Analyst at West Kent PCT, praised the work of Habiba and Yvette.
Marina explained: 'The face-to-face support from Habiba and Yvette was crucial and provided in such a way to ensure practices can continue to submit data by themselves in the future.' |
