CONTINUITY MEASUREMENT WITHIN GENERAL PRACTICES
'If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it'.
St Leonard’s has developed a GP friendly instrument for measuring continuity of care. We call it the SLICC (St Leonard’s Index of Continuity of Care) and have published on it in the BJGP. You can also watch Professor Philip Evans talk about this in Webinar 3 on the Royal College of General Practitioners' website
More information on the advantages of the SLICC compared with other continuity measures can be found here.
To calculate the SLICC for a given month, practices need to extract data on all face-to-face GP consultations which took place within that month including which GP the patient saw and who their personal or named “usual” doctor is.
Then a simple calculation is performed, dividing the number of consultations that were with the patients’ personal GP by the total number of GP consultations. This can be done for the whole practice population or for individual lists.
We have supplied an Excel-based toolkit to several practices using SystmOne to make it easier to calculate and record the SLICC and to display the results. We also have a version which can work with EMIS although it is less well developed so requires more EMIS expertise to get up and running. Practices using EMIS may prefer to try the "One care usual GP tool" from RCGP elearning.
If you are a practice using a personal list or named-usual-doctor system and would like to try our method of measuring continuity, please contact us.
