PPG Minutes: TTuesday 27th June 2023

 

BACK TO MAIN INDEX

 

Update 

Staffing Changes

GP Changes

  • Dr Fenske is retiring 31st July
  • Dr Philip has returned from maternity.
  • Dr Stern has joined us doing regular locum sessions

GP Teams - our current teams are:

  • Blue Team – Dr Catherine Neden, Dr John Neden, Dr Pick, Dr Woodward, Dr Mash, Dr Philip, Dr Sivasubramaniam
  • Green Team – Dr Kent, Dr Sivakumar, Dr Dawes, Dr Fenske, Dr Culatto
  • Acute Care Team – Dr Macpherson

Clinical Team

  • Heidi Rawbone has joined us a Clinical Pharmacist.
  • Helen now has a permanent contract with u

Non-Clinical Team

  • Nursing team administrator Tia has left the practice. Job vacancy is currently being advertised.
  • Gerald will be retiring at the end of October.
  • Angela Bracey has been appointed the new Practice Manager and is already in situ.
  • Sarah Winstone has been appointed the new Deputy Practice Manager and we will have a start date for her in the near future.

Other staff changes

  • As we are a training practice, our current GP registrars are Dr Zaveri, DrMahmoud and Dr Ucha, who is in his final 16months of training.
  • Dr Ivchenko will be re-joining us for his final 12 months of training in August this year
  • We have finished our 3rd year of hosting KMMS medical school students and we look forward to welcoming a new allocation of year 1 & year 4 students in October.

Other evolving changes within the practice

  • New telephone system – we continue to have generally positive feedback from patients and staff about our new phone system.
  • We are offering more face to face appointment- 11% more than pre-pandemic.
  • Registration packs are now handed out on the 1st Wednesday of every month instead of Saturday mornings. The rise in patients seeking new registration packs is mainly down to the patient being unhappy at their current surgery rather than the increase in new housing in Thanet. The amount of packs available depends on our current patient numbers and are available on a first come first serve basis. We do not hold a waiting list for new patient packs.

New phone system features

  • No engaged tone
  • Call back option available
  • Queueing system
  • Options to select ‘prescriptions’ and ‘test results’ and we have added a ‘cancel appointment’ option.
  • Integrated with our clinical system
  • Easier to listen back to calls if required
  • Better call statistic information which was not a feature of our old system
  • Could we change the music?

Phone statistics over 6 months Sep 22 to May 23

  • Total attempts to call the practice 116,344 –Total calls answered 62830
  • This equates to 336 calls answered per day Average calls answered every 2 minutes.

E-Consults

  • E-consult hours are now back to 8-18.30 Monday –Friday. We are now trialling an E-consult inbox.

Access to Appointments

  • We currently have a team of 12 GPs (excluding our Acute Care Team doctor) and access is seen as quite good. BMA guidance suggests that surgeries should be providing around 72 appointments per 1000 patient population.
  • East Cliff currently offers around 95 appointments per 1000 of practice population – these appointments are spread across doctors, nurses and other clinics.

Face to Face Appointments (F2F)

  • As a result of our trial we have increased the number of F2F appointments. Around 79% of our appointments are now face to face.
  • We now offer a mix of appointments and patients are still happy to use telephone consultations to avoid the need to travel to the surgery and for greater convenience when a F2F appointment is not necessary
  • 3% of appointments are for home visits.
  • 16% are phone consultations
  • We do not currently offer any digital appointments.
  • We have just under 16,000 patients registered with us.
  • In the last year 9,799 unique patients were seen.
  • 6,889 have been seen more than once.
  • 3,724 have been seen more than 3 times or more within a 3 month period.

Medication issues

  • 92,413 Total Acute Medication issues
  • 215,336 Total repeat medication issues
  • 307,749 Total medication issues
  • In the last 12 months to the 12th June 2023 there have been a total of 99,560 tests ordered. Averaging 1,909 per week.
  • In the last 12 months to the 12th June 2023 there have been a total of 5,049 referrals made, averaging 97 per week.

Did Not Attend Rates

  • We are seeing a rise in DNAs. On average one in seventeen appointments over the last few months were missed. These are sometimes on the day appointments that are booked in the morning and then not attended in the afternoon.
  • These appointments have resulted in 114 hours of wasted practitioner time which is equivalent to a 1.1 full time equivalent clinician
  • To try and reduce the amount of DNA’s we have a message on our website, our Practice Nurses may call any patients who have not turned up for their appointment and we have the ‘cancel appointment’ ‘option 3’ on our phone system.
 

AOB - Discussion

  • Can the music be changed on the phone system?
  • If you have an acute problem that you need more than one course of antibiotics for, does that count towards the ‘new prescriptions issued’ figures or the ‘repeat prescriptions issued’ figures? If the GP thinks you will be on the medication for longer than 6 months then it will fall into the repeat prescriptions category.
 

Our next PPG meeting will be Tuesday 26th Sept 2023 at 6pm