Integrated Paediatric Service

Integrated Paediatric Service (IPS) is a new care model was set up to deliver specialise health care services for children in acute and community settings to receive specialist care by appropriately qualified staff in their own home or primary care settings. The target patient groups include 0-16 years (19 special needs).

The service model include

• Children with chronic illness being seen by the same team of professionals in both hospital and community
• Facilitate direct access and admission to hospital
• Multi-disciplinary team (MDT) which is clinically lead that will interface with primary care clinicians to provide the highest quality of individual holistic care to the child and family  
• Working with consultants in clinics located in hospitals, homes and schools

To facilitate this the level of interface between primary and secondary care services should be seamless between the various clinical system example, EMIS interface with e-referral (ERS). As at the time of writing this, integration between both systems doesn’t exist so GPs at primary care level may not be able to refer patients directly to secondary care without the use of a clinical assessment service to triage referrals between primary and secondary care.  

The advantage of IPS include

Paediatric Referral Triage

• Reduced numbers of inappropriate outpatient referrals due to the Consultants ability to defer back to

primary care with advice and guidance.

• Patients being seen in the right place first time reducing duplication of care

Integrated Clinics

• Reduced need for outpatient follow-up due to improved handover to primary care

• Cost savings due to redirection of outpatient activity into clinics at a lower tariff

MDTs

• Reducing the need to refer to secondary care for specialist advice saving outpatient referrals

• Providing a platform for proactively managing patients and best utilising early help and community service

reducing the reliance on secondary care

Teaching and engagement

• Upskilling GPs and increasing their confidence to treat children in secondary care

• Removing barriers to GPs seeking advice and guidance from secondary care, reducing the need for

outpatient referrals to secondary care