South West London CCG Annual Report and Accounts 2020/21

service changes did not result in unintended negative consequences for patients or for other health and care organisations or communities. During recovery, this group became the Service Change Oversight Group. The South West London Ethics Committee was established to ensure wider access to ethical decision-making support and governance. The purpose of the committee was to assist clinical teams across South West London in making difficult clinical/ethical decisions in a multi-disciplinary team setting during and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. The Clinical Cell also supported 15 elective recovery clinical networks, each led jointly by acute and primary care clinicians. These clinical networks were originally set up to support restarting elective surgical operations and treatments, enabling primary care clinicians and our hospitals to work together to manage those patients whose operations had been put on hold and most urgently needed care. As a CCG we were able to support these new networks with experienced primary care clinicians and expert commissioning managers, ensuring a focus on the whole patient journey and coordinating patient care across different settings. Phase 2: Becoming the South West London Clinical Leadership Group As the initial phase of managing the pandemic moved to recovery, the Clinical Cell became the Clinical Leadership Group (CLG) and provided rapid clinical input into the restart work and guided the “reshape” clinical transformation workstreams. This group used data and professional clinical advice to support the prioritisation of the recovery programme looking at the areas of greatest need. The CLG also worked together to capture the learning from phase one of the pandemic to help prepare the clinical and operational response to phase 2 over the winter. Supporting our new Primary Care Networks Primary Care Networks (PCNs) brought together GP practices in July 2019 to provide a wider range of services for local people. They are now the footprint around which community-based health and social care professionals deliver more joined-up care for our communities and have achieved huge success in delivering the Covid vaccine to around 600,000 people across South West London. At the beginning of the lockdown, GP practices had to rapidly adapt services in response to the pandemic. The CCG worked with PCNs to support practices and their staff to adapt to new ways of working, operating a telephone triage and online consultation service model to reduce the risk of transmission in GP surgeries. As well ensuring they were able to continue providing effective care to Covid patients in a safe environment, whilst minimising the risk of infection to all staff and patients. Supporting patients in this way also helped to protect the capacity of our acute hospitals. Many practices have told us that they are keen to continue the new ways of working – for example, video conferencing – and therefore we are working to support this to happen and to encourage people to get the most Annual Report and Accounts 2020/21 | 15