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The benefits of this project
Benefits for Your Patients
- Improved health via warmer, better insulated home environment
- Save money on energy bills
Benefits for Your Practice
- Improved patient health lowers healthcare demand
- Improved relationship between patients and the practice
Benefits for The Planet
- Reduced need for healthcare will reduce the environmental impact of healthcare
Opportunity for improvement
- Living in a cold home is associated with increased health risks. Improving the energy efficiency of homes is therefore important for patient wellbeing, as well as reducing unnecessary fuel consumption.
- This project aims to help GP practices identify at-risk patients and enable them to get help to improve the energy efficiency of their homes (see disclaimers).
- You might like to create SMART goals for your project e.g. Within the next 2 weeks, tailor the fuel poverty plan for the practice and agree with the practice lead team when to send the text message.
How to carry out this project
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Investigate
Research what local options are available to your patients to help them stay warm at home and improve the energy efficiency of their homes. Your social prescribing team may have great ideas.
These national websites may be helpful too:
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Discuss
Chat to the wider practice team including the practice leads to see how the practice can better support patients with cold homes.
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Fuel poverty plan
Tailor this fuel poverty plan for your practice and take it to the practice lead team for approval.
Make sure to contact any organisations you plan to direct patients to check they have capacity. This is especially important for smaller organisations. You might like to ask them to consider recording the GP practice of the people who contact them to see if your intervention makes a difference.
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Contact patients
Send this message to the patients identified as being most at risk from cold homes (see fuel poverty plan). You could send this message out in batches throughout the year depending on the capacity of the organisation you are directing patients to.
Resource: Fuel poverty
Warm homes are important for health. If you are having trouble staying warm at home, please contact (insert local number / website) for energy saving advice and support. These tips from the Red Cross may be helpful for staying warm at home and saving money on energy bills.
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Consider patients who may not have access to text messages
Not all patients are able to use SMS so consider other contact methods e.g. encouraging staff to ask patients about keeping warm at home e.g. during long term conditions health checks.
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Training
Run a training session for the healthcare team on fuel poverty and how to refer. Staff could send the patients the text message above if they need help or make a referral to the social prescribing team if greater support is needed.
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Review
Keep in regular contact with the local organisation(s) that you direct patients to monitor any changes or issues e.g. does the text message generate too many self-referrals for the organisation to cope with?
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Study
Review the results, summarise learning, share with practice team + decide if any changes are needed to improve the process. Decide how often to review the fuel poverty plan and send messages to patients. Use the Project Monitoring form to keep track.
Top tip
Chat to your social prescribing team early on – they may have helpful suggestions of local organisations and resources to support patients.
How to scale this project up or down
| Please note - Use of this project requires NetworkPLUS membership. If you would like to share this project with others, please invite them to purchase their own membership—access must not be shared with non-members. |
Share your project with your PCN, Federation, ICB (England) or Cluster, Health Board (Scotland or Wales) or GP federation, Health Trust (Northern Ireland), so the learning can be shared and the project easily implemented by other practices too.
Case study
We did this project as part of the Green Impact for Health Toolkit. It was quick and easy to do. The local energy charity we worked with said they had a good response with over twenty of our patients contacting them after we sent the message.
Charlotte Keel Medical Practice, Bristol
Have you completed this QIP?
Tell us a little about your project and enter your data in order to generate a certificate showing the probable cost savings and other benefits. This project may help with CQC evidence submission (see disclaimers).
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