Patient Ambassador

Hamara HLC are currently recruiting a Patient Ambassador to work in collaboration with General Practice services to patient, many of whom often find it difficult to engage with healthcare and certainly find it difficult to navigate the healthcare system. The Patient Ambassador aims to provide a mixture of reactive and pro-active communication to improve the healthcare experience of all patients to support their ability to ‘choose well’ and link up with appropriate services available.

The Patient Ambassador provides an ‘in practice’ presence which can undertake more detailed and person centred communication than a clinician is sometimes able to complete and aims to educate and motivate the patient and build links with existing community and statutory bodies and in particular connect for Health.

We have identified particular needs across our large population of young people and those who have English as a Second language and this role aims to develop systems and processes which help us to improve how we interact with these patient groups.

**Responsibilities/Main Duties**:
Main Tasks:
**Improve Attendance Rates for Review Appointments**

Support existing practice recall system for patients with long-term conditions, focusing on those who regularly do not attend for annual review and looking to increase attendance rates and general engagement. Extent this to cover recalls/invites for vaccinations/health checks. This will involve identifying and communicating pro-effectively with patients to encourage attendance at a series of regular review appointments.

Examine current system across Practices for managing patients who have little or no English and find ways to engage the system with their needs, support them in attending the practice where appropriate and sign post effectively to other services as required.

**Year of Care**

The practices deliver management of patients with long-term conditions using what is known as a year of care approach which involves engaging patients with their health care and helping them identify goals to improve their health overall and reduce the impact of any condition they may have on day-to-day life.

The Patient Ambassador should support delivery of year of care by taking referrals from nurses/ GPs (or reviewing cases pro-actively themselves) where a care plan has been agreed with a patient and help the patient achieve the outcomes intended by the plan. This will typically be through referral to connect for health to allow the patient to gain access to the most appropriate services available in the community.

The Patient Ambassador will encourage attendance/engagement with any Community Services by facilitating easy referral in practice and following this up with provider and patient to get real time feedback on the benefit/value added.

**Patient Education**

Facilitate and co-ordinate regular ‘in practice’ health Education displays across waiting areas, websites, patient information screens and through other clinical and community partners to help patients better understand the benefits to them of the health care system and how best to navigate the different areas available to them.

**Role Development**:
Options for development of the service are vast and we would ask the Patient Ambassador to regularly review and develop their impact across the group with initial options for role development including:

- Pro-actively targeting patients from specific disease register within boundaries set by the GPs to offer lifestyle training/support
- Pro-actively contacting patients on receipt of hospital discharge notices and other communications (for example where people fail to attend following a referral) to book alternative appointments
- Pro-active management of patients failing to attend appointments in practice
- Pro-active running support projects for specific patient groups
- for example working with carers Leeds to support carers/patients in their care.
- Pro-actively working with Leeds Fit for work or similar to provide occupational health services for patients on long term sick (or potentially on long term sick) to help them get better more quickly and return to work more quickly
- Pro-actively monitor attendance of secondary care referrals
- Proactively delivering events within the community to engage with harder to reach groups -for example mums and baby’s coffee morning alongside medical baby clinics
- Identifying trends in terms of patient need and where feasible delivering ‘in house’ group sessions as a support solution or facilitating patients to deliver their own support services
- Taking the service beyond the four walls of the GP practice and out in into the community
- Integrating with other existing providers, health trainers etc. but most importantly Co-ordinating how these services are used by patients and linking these services in to their use of statutory services as well

**Information Technology**

To have an overall understanding of IT