Long term conditions

Primary care has the potential to transform and improve the lives of the 15 million people in England who currently live with one or more long-term conditions. …… Despite pressures and competing priorities, improving continuity of care and ensuring general practice provides a wider range of services closer to people’s homes, really must be number one.
Dr Mike Bewick; (GP and Practice Team bulletin: October 2013)

COVID-19

UCL Partners have developed a package of tools and resources designed to enable primary care teams to continue to effectively manage patients with long-term conditions going forward. The long-term condition framework and support package  focuses on asthma and COPD, and is based on four core principles:

  • Virtual by default
  • Mobilising the wider workforce (including pharmacists, HCAs, nursing associates, social prescribers and others)
  • Step change in support for self-management
  • Digital innovation, including tools for self-management and technology for remote monitoring.

It includes search and risk stratification tools, education and training resources and digital tools.

Read about the some of the resources the Royal College of General Practitioners has produced relating to long-term conditions here, including their 2022 Vision for the future of general practice.

Learning Resources

Education for Health aim to support the development of the knowledge, values and competencies required to manage Long Term Conditions. They offer a range of level 5, 6, 7 and 8 courses, including a number of free elearning resources

Care planning

Care planning is all about confidence, forging an interactive partnership between clinician and patient to support self management of their long term condition by patients.  Read about the RCGP’s work around Collaborative Care and Support Planning.

Clinical conditions:

Deafness and Hearing Loss

RCGP have developed a Deafness and Hearing Loss toolkit which supports GPs and GP trainees to implement the latest NICE guidelines and NHS Accessibility Quality Standard and guidance across the UK. The resources developed aim to educate GPs and trainees on deafness and hearing loss, help reduce variations in accessibility to GP practices and ensure deafness and hearing loss are considered across all aspects of primary care activity including consultations and continued care.

Dementia

See Dementia Care

Diabetes

There are a range of course on diabetes available on the RCGP Learning platform, including Non-diabetic Hyperglycaemia and the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme which discuss the evidence behind the programme and who should be offered referral.

Diabetes UK has produced Diabetes in Healthcare, an introductory course accredited by the Royal College of Nursing for healthcare professionals who are not specialists in diabetes but want to know more about the condition.

Other diabetes CPD resources include

In an article in GM Journal, the authors discuss  The challenge of managing type 2 diabetes in the older patient.

Epilepsy

There are two elearning packages on Epilepsy on the e-learning on the eLfH platform. One is designed to ensure that GPs have access to a high quality learning module to enable better support for people living with epilepsy and to raise awareness of the whole-person approach to care, resulting in reduced risk of repeat acute admissions and unnecessary deaths within the epilepsy population.  The second will enable healthcare professionals, particularly those who are not specialists in Epilepsy, to better understand Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP).

Musculoskeletal disorders

The Musculoskeletal primary care e-learning programme has been developed to support clinicians working in primary care as first contact practitioners (FCP)  in a primary care environment.

Working with the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) the Scoliosis Association UK have developed an e-learning module focussed on scoliosis which aims to help GPs to assess patients with scoliosis, recognise who needs referral and in what time frame. It also provides information on how best to treat and support people with scoliosis through diagnosis and long-term follow-up, considering both their physical and mental health as well as the psychological impact a diagnosis can have on the family.

Neurological conditions

The Motor Neurone Association has a collection of learning resources for healthcare professionals 

Respiratory conditions

Respiratory Matters.  – Training and qualifications around asthma, COPD and spirometry suitable for GPs, Nurses and Pharmacists.

Primary Care Respiratory Academy –  a clinical educational platform for generalist primary care health professionals, the CPD modules page includes a range of interactive self-study courses subjects as diverse as diagnosing childhood wheeze, pulmonary rehabilitation and interpreting spirometry results.

The CPD Zone is brought to you by the GP schools of Health Education England working across Thames Valley and Wessex, in association with Oxford Health FT Library.​