PD MDT-quality improvement project

Parkinson's Disease (PD) affects over 6 million people globally. Because of the rapidly ageing population, the number of people affected by PD is projected to double to over 12 million by 2040.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a huge negative impact on the PD patients’ care at Mid Yorkshire Hospitals Trust. Some of our Parkinson’s Team members were redeployed, had to isolate, or were affected by COVID-19 themselves. The Trust stopped face to face (FTF) consultations for the patients. This forced us to adapt, and we developed a local protocol for video appointments using the Attendanywhere conferencing platform.

We quickly realised that this was not as effective as FTF consultations. Our PD patients’ physical and mental health markedly deteriorated while staying at home through the pandemic, requiring more complex and specialist care to return to baseline.

We had weekly meetings with the PD nurses before the pandemic and took these online during lockdown. This offered us an opportunity to invite other specialists to the PD Multidisciplinary Meetings. The Physiotherapists and the Neuropsychologists attended the most frequently and the Speech and Language Specialists attended if necessary.

We started in June 2021 and we discussed 54 patients over 3 months and compiled some broad statistics of the patients and their outcomes over that period. Overall, we found the weekly MDTs very useful because most of the patients had complex needs requiring multidisciplinary analysis. We already noticed that there is a need for the MDT coordinator, as the logistics of keeping the patients’ lists updated, documenting and spreading the outcome to the MDT members is time consuming. We will continue with the meetings going forward, but we will discuss the need for employing the MDT Coordinator with the Managers.