Hello everyone. I'm recently new to post and my remit is to develop shared care within South Tyneside. I'm about to look at writing protocols for this and would be most grateful if anyone could forward their experinces of best practice in this area. I can be emailed at Wayne.Davie@stw.nhs.uk. Many thanks in advance

Wayne,
Have you looked in the library section?, may be something there that may be of use.

Yes go to home page, then >> 'resource library >> 'local guidelines'. There are loads there, and all very good. We did ours jointly with Kirklees, and Neil Hopkinson had the bright idea of putting them online, with links to relevant documents like the 1999 guidelines, and RCGP Bup guidelines. The local bit was just to fill in any gaps left after reading these - this avoids duplication of effort, or worse, contradicition which could leave people confused. It also saved a lot of time!

The other thing i would say is if you don't do it that way, and you do write a farily lengthy thing, keep the chapters completely separate and numberd by chapter no first, then page number, (eg: 4.2) that way if you want to make an alteration, you just alter one chapter instead of having to reprint and reindex the whole lot because pages out of synch.

susi

Also Wayne, you are welcome to contact us (SMMGP) for advice on this as it is our remit. We can also give you even more sets of local guidelines than are on our web-site! I think however its best to talk it through because its important you tailor your scheme toyour local need and local history. Ideally as well you wouldn't be doing this alone but alongside other members of the shared care monitoring group (if you have one) in particular GPs on it. You do not want to develop these things on your own, in my opinion. You can contact me on 07717513711 or e-mail smmgp@freeuk.com

jim

Dear Jim,

being into my second week of starting a shared care service in Suffolk I too would appreciate you emailing over any local guidelines not on the web site. My email address is daniel.chapelle@suffolkpct.nhs.uk

Many thanks
Dan