The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has introduced an exciting new online service, ‘Report a Notifiable Disease’, which promises to make infectious disease notifications quicker and easier. For many GP practices, adhering to the legal requirement of notifying suspected or confirmed cases of notifiable diseases has often been a challenging and time-consuming process. This new service offers an excellent opportunity to streamline that work, reduce administrative burden, and enhance efficiency.
Why This Matters
Registered Medical Practitioners have a legal duty to notify the UKHSA of certain diseases—both suspected and confirmed cases. This notification allows the UKHSA to take rapid public health action to contain infections, protect patients and their families, and safeguard the wider community. Failure to notify can have serious consequences, not just in terms of public health, but also from a legal and compliance perspective, especially as these issues often come under scrutiny during Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspections.
The new online form is designed to make this process smoother and faster by allowing GPs to submit the necessary information directly to the UKHSA. For GP practices, this is a welcomed change, as it simplifies what can sometimes feel like a burdensome, yet essential, task.
What’s Changing?
Instead of relying on traditional reporting methods, the UKHSA’s new online service allows notifications to be made via a user-friendly form. This form collects all the necessary information and sends it directly to the UKHSA. This change is a significant improvement, saving time and reducing the risk of delays or missed notifications.
That said, it’s important to remember that urgent cases should still be reported by phone to ensure the fastest possible public health response. This is particularly important for fast-spreading or high-risk infections, where immediate intervention is critical.
What Should Your Practice Do Next?
This new system offers an excellent opportunity to review and update your practice’s approach to reporting notifiable diseases. Here are a few key steps you can take:
1. Review and Update Your Clinical System Pop-ups:
•Ensure that the pop-ups or alerts in your clinical system for notifiable diseases are up to date. These alerts can serve as helpful reminders for clinicians when a reportable condition is suspected or diagnosed.
•Take the time to refine and streamline these pop-ups so that they prompt the appropriate action without causing alert fatigue.
2. Update Your Practice Policy:
•Review your practice’s current policy for managing notifiable diseases, ensuring it reflects the new online reporting process.
•Make sure your team is aware of how to use the new service and understands the importance of continuing to report urgent cases via phone.
•This is an ideal time to ensure that your policies are aligned with legal requirements and public health best practices—something that will be highly beneficial when your next CQC visit rolls around.
3. Training and Communication:
•Make sure all clinical staff are aware of the new reporting tool and know when and how to use it.
•Consider adding this topic to your next practice meeting or training session to ensure the whole team is up to speed on both the legal requirements and the new, simplified process.
Preparing for Your Next CQC Visit
Notifiable diseases and how they are managed in your practice is an area that could be scrutinised during your next CQC inspection. By taking the opportunity to streamline your reporting processes now, you’re not only ensuring compliance but also demonstrating your commitment to improving patient safety and public health.
The new online service is a timely tool that makes it easier than ever to fulfil your legal obligations, helping your practice stay compliant without sacrificing valuable time. Updating your systems and practice policy now will ensure that you are well-prepared for any future inspection and can confidently show that you are handling notifiable diseases in line with the latest requirements.
In Summary
The launch of the UKHSA’s ‘Report a Notifiable Disease’ service offers a practical and much-needed solution to a process that has often felt cumbersome. By streamlining disease notification, this service helps GP practices save time while ensuring compliance with legal duties.
This is an exciting opportunity to review your clinical system pop-ups, update your practice policies, and prepare your team for future CQC inspections. Embracing this change will not only help your practice stay on top of notifiable disease reporting but also support the wider public health effort to reduce the spread of infection.
Here is a template email that you may wish to use and adapt to brief your team:
Template Email: Briefing Team on New UKHSA Online Notifiable Disease Reporting Service
Subject: Important Update: New UKHSA Online Reporting Tool for Notifiable Diseases
Dear Team,
I hope this finds you well.
I wanted to share an important update regarding the process for reporting notifiable diseases. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has recently launched a new online service called ‘Report a Notifiable Disease’. This new tool will allow us to notify cases of infectious diseases more quickly and easily through an online form, helping us to meet our legal obligations with greater efficiency.
You can access the new online form via this link: Report a Notifiable Disease.
Key Points:
•Legal Requirement: As Registered Medical Practitioners, we have a legal duty to notify the UKHSA of any suspected or confirmed notifiable diseases. This is crucial for supporting public health action, reducing the spread of infections, and protecting our patients and the wider community.
•Urgent Cases: Please remember that urgent cases must still be phoned through to UKHSA to ensure a prompt response.
•List of Notifiable Diseases: You can view the full list of notifiable diseases here: Notifiable Diseases List.
What We Need to Do:
•Update Clinical System Alerts: We’ll be reviewing our system pop-ups to ensure that alerts around notifiable diseases are up-to-date and correctly configured.
•Review Practice Policy: Our current process for managing notifiable diseases will be updated to reflect this new online reporting tool. Please ensure you familiarise yourselves with any changes to the policy, which will be shared soon.
•Training: I will be including this in our next team meeting for a brief walkthrough of how to use the new online service.
This is a great opportunity to streamline the reporting process, making it quicker and easier to fulfil our legal obligations while improving our efficiency in protecting public health. Let’s take this chance to ensure our processes are aligned and ready ahead of our next CQC inspection.
If you have any questions or need further clarification, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Best regards,
[Your Name]
Practice Manager