John Craig’s blog looks at why the need to help carers, help clinicians has never been greater.

We have been working on Expert Care for over a year now, equipping home-carers to spot ill-health, run tests and, if necessary, call the right clinician with the right information. Early indications are that both the carers and the recipients of care love the service.

When we asked home-carers what was most challenging about Expert Care, they surprised me. I thought it might be the using the pulse oximeter or holding the protocols in their head, but it wasn’t. The toughest part of being an Expert Carer is that sometimes you have to talk to a GP.

The first time a home-carer talks to a doctor at work, sometimes they do what I do at a GP appointment. They clam up, forgot what they really wanted to say and agree to anything. ‘OK, and can you stay with the patient until 4pm?’ ‘Oh yes, doctor – anything you say, doctor’. Cue three other disappointed service users and an irate manager. Talking to a doctor like an equal partner, from a standing start, is not easy.

So, one small ray of light in the Covid-19 emergency has been the upending of this dynamic. GPs have relied hugely on domiciliary carers to tell them who needs an appointment and to hold up the smartphone to make it happen. Domiciliary carers have even found themselves taking images of wounds for doctors. When every face-to-face appointment is a risk, GPs’ partnership with carers is vitally important.

So, while our testing of Expert Care – part of our work for the Test Bed programme, run by NHS England and the Office for Life Sciences – has been a bit disrupted by Covid-19, the relationships on which it depends are now much stronger. And the need to help carers spot deteriorating health early – and to help clinicians make the right decision quickly – has never been greater.

We are more determined than ever to build on our Expert Care work, and to show that home-carers can be life-savers.