Musculoskeletal Services
We have started work to transform our musculoskeletal (MSK) services to improve the service for our patients and staff. Our ambition is to strengthen our community provision over the next five years to improve the care that people receive.
Our community MSK services include a range of specialisms and departments which are delivered by a number of providers with different referral routes, care pathways and operational practices. This has led to patients and clinicians often feeling frustrated by the time it takes for patient information to be passed from one service to another, resulting in delays to care and treatment.
By enabling our highly skilled teams across these services to work more closely and share patient information easily through a more joined up MSK model, we can remove these barriers and ensure people can access and move through and between our MSK services more smoothly.
The MSK programme of transformation is about making the referral process simpler, ensuring patients are seen by the most appropriate clinician, and reducing waiting times.
We are not proposing to reduce services nor limit the treatment options that are currently provided.
The transformation will be delivered in three phases over the coming years in partnership with people who use the services, our staff and stakeholders.
To read our frequently asked questions, please click here Musculoskeletal Transformation Programme FAQ May 22(002)
To help shape the transformation of our Musculoskeletal services in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin, we asked people who have used the services to share their experiences and their views about what they will look like in the future.
The feedback we received from our survey captured what was good about the services and identified opportunities where things could be improved.
People’s responses strongly reflected their positive views of our staff and how they were treated. They told us that they felt respected and listened to when they are undergoing treatment and felt involved in making decisions about their care.
The findings from the survey also suggest areas where we might be able to make improvements. These include: reducing the time between referral to treatment; providing more joined-up services; ensuring people have access to advice when they need it; and timely communications to patients.
Views about the future service model were positive. People agreed that a single referral process, multi-disciplinary triage teams, closer working between services and earlier therapy intervention will all help to deliver a better experience.
Whilst the number of responses is only a portion of the number of people accessing our services, it gives us a starting point to explore how our services can build on and learn from this insight.
For example, we are undertaking some specific engagement with our rheumatology patients. This will help us to better understand their experiences, share changes that have been made to improve the service since the survey, check the impact of those changes and together identify what else we can do.
This feedback is hugely valuable to help shape our services. We are really grateful to those who shared the survey and everyone who took the time to complete it.