Quality Standards news
We’re delighted to inform the Lyme community that NICE is now working on a set of standards designed to drive measurable quality improvements of care for Lyme disease patients in the UK.
What are quality standards?
Quality Standards play an important role in helping to get guidelines adopted into common use around the NHS. They are a focused list of around five statements that aim to achieve the biggest improvements to current practice and patient outcomes, by addressing areas of poor or variable practice.
How are Caudwell LymeCo involved?
As a charity which offers guidance and information about the NICE guideline for Lyme patients and listens to them about their experience, we feel we are well positioned to pinpoint areas where current practice is inconsistent and could be improved, and our C.E.O., Veronica Hughes was invited to join the Quality Standards Advisory Committee. Veronica has also suffered from Lyme disease herself.
How will these quality standards help?
Since the guideline was published in April, we’ve seen a real improvement in the rate that patients are being tested and treated promptly for Lyme disease. But a lot more could be achieved, and we hope our contribution to the QSAC will help this along.
What happens next?
We’ll keep you up to date with what Quality Standards are set and how these will help you or your loved ones when it comes to diagnosing or treating Lyme disease.
Helping Lyme disease sufferers to get recommended treatment
We’re also pleased to tell you that we were recently successful in getting BNF to update their treatment summary and amoxicillin doses for Lyme disease in line with NICE guidelines.
BNF Publications bring “authoritative, independent guidance on best practice together with clinically validated drug information” and are often referred to by GPs when looking for information on suggested treatment and drug doses.
It was brought to our attention by a number of patients that they were being given half the dose of amoxicillin by doctors who were referring to the BNF for guidance. We got in touch with the BNF directly with the request that they update their information in line with the NICE guidelines. They investigated, and will be updating their treatment recommendations accordingly in due course.
We hope this will go some way towards preventing a delay for some patients in receiving the recommended treatment.