A number could save your patient’s life

We are all looking for ways to improve patient care and work more efficiently and, at the Forget Me Not Children’s Hospice in West Yorkshire, they have found a way. By using and quoting the child’s NHS number on information requests, rather than creating a new “hospice number”, they have dramatically sped up access to care.

When a child is referred to the hospice, staff routinely contact all the healthcare professionals involved in the child’s care. This process usually involves getting in touch with between 15 to 25 healthcare professionals for each child, which can be time consuming. And, all the while, the child is waiting for weeks to receive care.

Michael Tatterton, Deputy Head of Care at the hospice, says: “On average, including the NHS number on information requests has decreased the time between referral and commencing provision of care by around four weeks.

“We now specifically ask for the child’s NHS Number on referral as its use has really increased our efficiency.  If the NHS number is not supplied (for example, in cases of family self-referrals) we will contact the child’s GP practice for the NHS number before sending out information requests.”

The hospice’s experience demonstrates how using the NHS Number can transform patient care. So how, as nurses and midwives, can we use it to make improvements in our own settings? The power of the NHS Number to uniquely identify a person is fundamental – our patients expect and trust us to get their care right ‘first time and every time’.

I know, I know I hear you cry, “But many local systems such as hospital Patient Administration Systems (PAS) and some GP Practice computer systems use an internal patient number which is a unique reference for that patient’s records within that system? But it’s not applicable to the patient outside of that local computer system.”

Fundamental changes to our NHS will, and already are, having a major effect on where and when patients access healthcare. Care will be provided in diverse settings, with more bodies working in partnership, and may or may not be within current organisational structures. These local identifiers are not common to all organisations and cannot be used safely. This is when using the patients NHS Number becomes really crucial.

The NHS Number is used throughout the NHS across all care settings and allows for all records for a patient to be joined up where appropriate. The ability to provide more seamless care on the basis of relevant, reliable patient information is fundamental to the government’s plans to modernise the NHS.

So why should nurses care about this? GPs have been using the NHS number for many years, but, traditionally, most nurses and midwives have been content to leave this part of a patient’s identification profile to back room or administrative staff. This cannot continue in an increasingly complex and technically challenging environment where we all working under pressure to do more for less.

The NHS Number is a powerful patient safety tool during a time of transition to help us ensure we are providing the right patients with the right care.

 Anne Cooper is the national clinical lead for nursing at the Department of Health Informatics Directorate.

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