Have you heard of this? do you care? well as a GP it wont affect you much yet - but I have a sneaking suspicion that it may in the future. The "TOP" (the unfortunate clash of acronyms has clearly not bothered the NTA whose knowledge of gynaecology I would imagine is scant) is a simple new scoring tool to assess patient progress in treatment. Like the NDTMS data set, it is (at the moment) the job of your Shared Care worker to complete. So why would a GP need to know about this? well I can imagine some PCTs making the completion of these three monthly forms part of your LES, particulalrly if you are a more advanced GP who might start a patient on treatment before the Shared Care worker is involved - or you might be required to fill them in if you are supporting a patient's abstinence and the Shared Care worker has withdrawn.
But fear not, the form is easy and quick to fill in - and should provide some pragmatic and useful data on the value of treatment....Well MOST of the data is useful - but one question asks "How many "Spliffs" does the patient smoke a day!!! for Heaven's sake! are we talking Fat Ones? Four Skinners? A Camberwell Carrot??!!
I don't think that any GPs yet need to be involved in this new bureaucracy - but if you happen to be the sort of proactive, anally retentive sort who wants to know everything that is going on, then click here and you will be beamed over to the NTA documentation and you can read all about it.
