Assessment of Older People's Health and Social Care Needs and ...

The Single AssessmentProcess in the UK: KeyAttributes and Implicationsfor Older People andProfessionalsOr Chris Ounstan, General Practitioner and formerly Co Chair of NationalAssessment Working Group, UK_1-----------------------------------The aim of this paper is to describe the Single Assessment Process in the UK. I became involved inassessment because, as a GP, I was becoming frustrated and that sense of frustration was fuelled bythe experiences of colleagues and patients. The following comments are illustrative:'When the Health Visitor came in after her day of~ she told me she already knew all the information 1spent yesterday afternoon collecting about that patient' (District Nurse)'1 can't think why the A&E department sent that patient home. Why didn't they check the homecircumstances first ?''It is difficult for us to get any nursing or medical input to assessments, so we often don't get thewhole picture' (Care Manager)'Why do so many people keep asking me the same questions? Haven't they got anything better todo, or don't they talk to each other' (Patient)Developing a Single Assessment ProcessThe Local LevelAs health and sociai care workers, we began to come together to clarify the kind of information weneeded about patients and clients and to look at how information was collected and shared. Wediscovered that 80 percent of the information we needed, whether we were district nurses, healthcare visitors, doctors, was the same. Despite this, we were collecting the information independentlyand in different formats. This led to the development at local level of a common Single AssessmentProcess for 30,000 patients, using one computer in one health centre. We call it a Single AssessmentProcess, not because there is a single assessment event but because, from the point of view of theclient, the aim is that it should be experienced as a single, seamless process.Conference Proceedings