Service Innovation Bulletin
Primary Care Trust
- Podiatrist-Led Lower Limb Vascular Triage Service
- Concomitant Screening for Gonorrhoea within a Chlamydia screening programme
Podiatrist-Led Lower Limb Vascular Triage Service
Tameside and Glossop PCT
This service has been developed by a PCT Podiatry High Risk Team, in partnership with the Acute Trust Vascular
Consultant Team.
Patient referrals from primary care to the hospital based Vascular Consultant Team are triaged by a Podiatry-led primary care service. All patients with non-acute peripheral arterial disease have a face-to-face assessment. They are then referred for primary care management or acute management; patients with an urgent/semi-urgent need are fast tracked into secondary care.
The service relies on partnerships working across primary and secondary care to develop and redesign joint care
pathways, assessment protocols and non-acute direct referral access.
Over a 12-month period approximately 550 patients have been referred to the service and 75% have been ‘deflected’ into primary care management (General Practice and specialist services); these patients receive pro-active disease management plans and are referred to previously unused services such as coronary heart disease risk factor management; dietetics, lifestyle management, etc.
The long-term aim of the service is to decrease related mortality and morbidity.
Concomitant Screening for Gonorrhoea within a Chlamydia screening programme
Liverpool PCT
This service facilitates opportunistic screening for the two most common bacterial sexually transmitted infections, using non-invasive testing. Men and women under the age of 25 years are able to access the service at over 84 sites across the Liverpool, South Sefton and Knowsley area. The commonly used single test for chlamydia does not pick up gonorrhoea and can create a false sense of security in people whose results are negative. Many chlamydia screening programmes nationally tend to offer screening for gonorrhoea only to those who test positive for chlamydia. However, this service has detected more cases of gonorrhoea in clients who tested negative for chlamydia, than in those who were positive.
This is the first chlamydia screening programme nationally to offer concomitant screening for both chlamydia and gonorrhoea, using Transcription Mediated Amplification (TMA) testing, outside of a Genito-Urinary Medicine (GUM) clinic setting. It was also joint first prize winner of the North West NHS Innovation Awards 2006 managed by
TrusTECH (in the Service Innovation Category).