Why PCSA Online created a platform for you

After a series of discussions and meetings the following questions kept arising , How do we support our Nursing and Allied Healthcare Professionals in career progression across Primary Care?

This may sound a very simple answer however it hasn’t been as easy to solve.
Training can be costly, time can be difficult to free up, appraisals can be skipped, good managers may not be great coaches. These challenges add to existing upheavals of taking hours to arrange all your paperwork for CQC revalidation or keeping hold of your training dates so you are compliant in a number of mandatory requirements or even finding a course ran by your local training HUB that is relevant and funded.

Taking everything into consideration and having the ability to research these ongoing challenges across a large number of practices we were able to identify a solution, make it a reality that is going to support all Nursing, AHP’s, Practitioners and Practices with compliance, time, a focus on development and the opportunity for career progression.

The platform considers how we can make our practices and managers life’s easier, so we have designed clear reportage across the team on CPD progression, appraisal dates and crucially a report across your teams of where there are clinical skills and gaps.

This will not only allow gaps in patient care to be solved it will allow you to view which of your team have expressed an interest in training or upskilling in particular disciplines. For the users, the clinicians they will have a digital CPD portfolio, gone are the days we you have a bulging lever arch file of paperwork and certificates. You will also have access to any training expiration dates that need to be renewed allowing you to prepare in advance.

You will be able to upload your most recent appraisal and set a date for your annual or 6-month review. The most important thing here is to have this information at a touch of a button to ensure you continue to focus on the objectives you and your manager set.

We at the PCSA online are not here to reinvent the wheel, but have created a product which will hopefully make life a little easier, when planning for the future. Our next step will be to continually improve the service through open feedback from our users and provide eLearning content and webinars to help you on your continuous journey.

That situation is now reversed with telephone, text-based and (to a lesser extent) video being used for over 80% of consultations in Primary Care.

As the pandemic subsides it is unlikely that the situation will revert to pre-Covid levels. Remote consultations are going to be a big part of our clinical lives for the foreseeable future. This is not all bad. As the Centre for Health Communication Research states:

“barriers which have been in place for years, preventing things like online communications, rapidly fell away when the lockdown kicked in”.

1 Those barriers arguably held back progress, denying patients access to the convenience and potentially empowering effects of remote consultations. This is not to say that face-to-face interactions with patients are going away – they will still have a vitally important place in primary care.

Certain conditions can only be fully assessed by the laying on of hands and whilst it is possible to express empathy by remote technology, sometimes the human touch is the only way to soothe a troubled patient.

To adjust to this new reality, we need to think about how we complete these consultations effectively.

Many of the communication skills needed for a good face-to-face consultation are transferable – the way you introduce yourself, build rapport and ask questions are all very similar. There are some important differences though and understanding these can help to reduce your stress as well as improve outcomes for patients.

There are ethical implications too – an estimated 9 million people in the UK lack the basic digital skills to use the internet effectively, with 7% of the population not using the internet at all. 2 Ensuring the “digitally excluded” are provided for in this new world is essential if this particularly vulnerable group are not going to be left behind.