Effective Shared Care Agreement

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Introduction

"Consistency of care across the secondary and primary care interface is critical for patients, particularly in times of great change within the NHS. Whilst effective shared care agreements are a useful tool in ensuring this consistency they are however, time consuming and resource intensive to produce. By providing this electronic template we hope to simplify the process for those healthcare professionals engaged in developing local policy on the use of key medicines."

Professor Stephen Chapman, Professor of Prescribing Studies at Keele University

The Effective Shared Care Agreement Toolkit is designed to assist healthcare professionals in the development of their own shared care agreements to support locally agreed prescribing. In particular, the Toolkit suggests ways in which responsibilities can be shared between the secondary care specialist and general practitioner (GP) / primary care prescriber.

Acting as a flexible template, the Toolkit enables users to consider proposed content relevant to the selected medicine - key principles, monitoring requirements, dosage and administration, contraindications, interactions, etc., - and tailor it to their local circumstances and requirements. Local agreements can be created by selecting and inserting pre-prepared content into a unique template document. Each template can then be edited and saved online for further review, or downloaded to the user's own computer.

The Effective Shared Care Agreement Toolkit and Keele University's work in developing shared care resources has been recognised by the General Medical Council in their guidance 'Good practice in prescribing and managing medicines and devices' (January 2013).

To access a particular toolkit, click on the boxes above or select from the menu on the left.

Feedback/Testimonials

From my perspective, you have put together an excellent resource!

Consultant

I have had a look at the toolkit which seems to work extremely well. Whilst some centres may opt to leave out some of the text it all seems eminently sensible to me and should forestall a lot of the arguments that so often seem to surround the development of ESCAs.

Consultant

I think Prescribing Support Teams will find this useful and easy to use - well done!!

GP

I've had a play with this - it is great! I found it easy to lift the elements of the template in and then managed to export it to Word and print out a document which looked correctly formatted.

GP

Thanks - it looks absolutely great!

Consultant

All the links work quickly & intuitively.

GP

I love the drag and drop - it's such a clever way of doing it!

GP

I think it is an excellent format, which relates the SPC to the baseline review and monitoring, thus providing a clear view of why every step is taken!

Senior Pharmacist