1. Medical Physicist, Dundee
Photonet Going Forward
Ewan Eadie
Medical Physicist, Dundee
and
Lead Clinician for
Photonet

2. Value Education Governance Engagement Improvement Service
Core Objectives
There are six core objectives for Scottish networks, you see these summarised on the slide here. The pieces of work Photonet is planning on doing in the next year and beyond all must fit with these Core Objectives. So I would like to run through these and explain what Photonets plan is for the next year but I also want to highlight that the network is always open to suggestions. Please feel free to contact us and we will table any suggestions at the next steering group meeting.

3. Governance Core Objectives The first core objective is governance.
There are items of work assigned to this objective but I’m not going to talk about them in the interest of time and because they are pretty dull. If you do want to look at them you can find the workplan on website

4. Service Core Objectives
The second core objective is service development and delivery. We have a couple of interesting plans in this area.

5. Guidelines
Photonet plans on producing three pieces of additional guidance this year, the first is complete and you can see it here.
Other guidelines on psoralen dosing and prescription glasses
We are also introducing a FAQ section to the website too.

6. The physics subgroup are also undertaking a project, developing a phantom which will remove the need for someone to enter a phototherapy cabinet and perform measurement. This is a big project and is likely to take a couple of years.

7. Core Objectives Engagement
The objective is called Stakeholder Communication and Engagement
Engagement

8. Twitter: @EczemaOutreach
And one of my main focus for my time as Lead Clinician will be to put a lot of focus in this area. We are very fortunate to have Eczema Outreach Support with us here today and I spoke at one of their patient events earlier this year. In this coming year I want to make connections with at least one more patient support organisation where phototherapy is a treatment option and then sit down with these organisations and try to work out how best the relationship can work.
Light Therapy has had the best skin outcome of all derma treatments and it kept the eczema at bay for a few months. Lovely to have a bit of respite albeit           

9. Core Objectives Education
Within Education I think Photonet does really well in this area as a network.
Education

10. Annual Meeting & LearnPro Module
We will continue to deliver the annual meeting and the online training module, both of which we will continue to improve based upon your feedback. Your feedback is therefore very important so please do remember to leave some!

11. Improvement Core Objectives
Audit and Continuous Quality Improvement is the core objective where we have the most actions going forward. Some are regular and core to our very being such as auditing against the photonet standards and keeping a secondary risk register of phototherapy incidents. Some are a bit newer…

12. Such as the dashboard. It is our aim this year to get more people engaged in the dashboard and that is of course why there is a workshop this afternoon. I came to it completely new and I would say I probably need a good half an hour to get familiar with it. The good thing though is that you can’t break it, so please login and just start pressing buttons to see what happens, it has some really useful information for that allows you to see how your centre or your area compares against other areas and against the photonet standards and to see your clearance rates too.

13.
And you can pick up trends as well. Here I have filtered for UVB only, Psoriasis only and whole body treatment only and I’m looking at comparing Ninewells Hospital to the rest of Scotland. See how the clearance rates drop in November and December? Why is that? And each centre has its own peculiarities so please do go on and take a look at your own data. There will be no paper report sent to you this year but we are planning for the following year to produce a single A4 sheet with some key numbers. It won’t however give you the detail that the dashboard does so I would encourage you again to go on and look at your centre.
With regards improvement we will also be doing a pilot study this year to look at gaining patient feedback throughout the year via online survey, this will be in addition to the 20 questionnaires we issue to each centre and ask them to get patients to complete. We are looking at some posters and cards that can be placed in a phototherapy unit and patients will follow the link to an online questionnaire. It will be piloted in just one centre this year because we are not sure what level of uptake we will get.

14. Value
Core Objectives
The final objective is Value and here we want to look at ways of promoting equal access to phototherapy across Scotland. We will do this by using the data from the dashboard to see if there are any gaps in service provision within each health board, we will ask all the lead phototherapy clinicians in each area what their vision is for their services and we will gain feedback and data from recently opened phototherapy centres in order that we can build an evidence base to help the lead phototherapy clinicians achieve their desired vision.

15. Value Education Governance Engagement Improvement Service
Core Objectives
That is a summary of some of the work that Photonet will be doing this year and going into the future. As always we rely upon you…

16. So thank you for being involved in the network
So thank you for being involved in the network. For everything you have done, whether its putting data into photosys, filling out your audit sheets or being a member of our steering committee. None of this would be possible without your contributions and I can say that this community, because that’s what Photonet is a community, this community is the envy of the rest of the UK and even further afield.
As always though we need more…

17. The Steering Group is recruiting new members, we particularly need nursing input and from the smaller more remote providers. If you can help please come see myself, Mhairi or Aneta and we can explain what is involved.
One final thing…

18. You will notice that we are trying to go paper free at Photonet
You will notice that we are trying to go paper free at Photonet. The reason for this is that when we collect information by paper, for example the evaluations at the end of today, we then have to take all those paper entries, transcribe them onto a computer and produce a report. Collecting the information electronically at the minimum removes the transcribing of data which can be very time consuming but can also make producing the report much quicker too.
Important to point out though that we won’t switch to electronic at the detriment of valuable information. This is why for example we are still doing paper patient questionnaires as we don’t know how good a response we will get from the online questionnaire.