It takes more than 10 years to translate national guidelines into common clinical practice and we’re closing the gap.

The Problem

Information Overload

7,000 good quality MSK Randomised Control Trials are produced per YEAR in English alone

It takes 17 years to translate evidence based practice into routine clinical practice and National Clinical Guidelines produce updates every 3 years.

If you read one article per day, you’d be 20 years behind, so we needed to close this gap and help our clinicians have evidence at their finger tips.

Clinical Variation is often unwarranted

Whilst information overload is a challenge, attempts to translate knowledge into practice exist to support clinicians to stay abreast of clinical developments. Clinical guidelines are one of these mechanisms but are often criticised as being too rigid, slow to adapt and developed by groups not representative of the intended use.

To close this gap and support our clinicians working in community healthcare delivery, we have developed our 10/10 Clinical Support Tools. These support tools are used alongside supervision, audit, and our Clinical Academy to aid the development of our clinical colleagues and support shared decision making within a person-centred framework for the fifteen most common conditions that we see in our service.

Connect Health has developed a unique set of clinical support tools covering the most common musculoskeletal conditions in order to deliver and measure the most clinically effective care. These support tools have been published in Versus Arthritis Joint Matters.

10/10 Traffic Light System – Covering what to do and what not to do

We have linked in the treatment categories on a traffic light system, which the treatment clinicians should be delivering. We are then able to monitor that we are applying the best evidence in advising patients and then report on the performance at individual clinician and overall service levels.

Considering we are seeing over 350,000 new episodes of care a year, this gives Connect Health significant data and contributes to the understanding of what works best for patients.

On an individual clinician level, we can start to help change their practice where required, to be more evidence based, linking in their preferences for treatment to their own outcomes.

This allows clinicians to recognise where treatments are less effective and enable them to aspire to develop good practice as demonstrated by personal outcomes and their colleague successes. Benchmarking against peers is fundamental in learning what works and what doesn’t work.

Our infographic summarising the Connect Health 10/10 Clinical Support Tools

Due to the successful roll-out of 10/10 clinical support tools, we have now extended the tools to cover 15 conditions. We list below the 15 infographic summaries for each clinical support tool.