Minutes of Meeting December 2022 – Feedback from October 28th.
Discussed as per below
Response to the Minutes of the Patient Participation Meeting of the 28TH October.
We would like to thank the Patient Participation Group for their valuable contribution during the recent meeting.
There were qualms highlighted from the meeting which are as follows.
- Lack of appointments, often leading to patients attending local Walk in Centre
- Telephone VS face to face appointments and the pros and cons.
Summary of Discussions among partners and Actions taken.
We have increased the number of pre bookable face to face and telephone appointments.
Previously many appointments were used to feedback patient’s test results, Now the GP’s have made a commitment to create additional appointments every day to feedback patients’ investigation results.
We are delighted to say that we have also trained our Practice Nurse Clare as Clinical Practitioner, who is also seeing and treating patients independently working alongside with GP’s. This an amazing addition to our clinical team.
This has created an additional extra 65-70 appointments every week to be booked by patients.
The walk-in centres are part of the extension of health provision funded by NHS in our community for our patients. The structure of community health services is changing (government led) with time. We work in a community structure called networks. This is done to provide more resources in the form of WIC/pharmacists/DNs/acute home visiting team etc to meet the demands and provide excellent available clinical care promptly. The sharing of records between all professionals and feedbacks are given. Appropriate investigations and referrals are done with liaison.
It is worth noting that appointment shortages are a national issue because of increased Clinical demands. Despite the BMA proposing to increase our appointment time per slot to 15 minutes, we have resisted the change as it will further decrease the number of appointments.
There are mixed preference of patients asking for appointments in the from of telephone/face to face/ e-consults. In order to fulfil all, we have a mixture of telephone and face to face pre bookable available with every GP and Nurses. Urgent on the day surgeries are all telephone consultations triaged by the duty doctor. All the patients who are telephone triaged or consulted are given the opportunity for a face-to-face assessment if clinically indicated.
Last but not least your valuable support and feedback is very important to us. We endeavour to provide the best clinical and non-clinical care to all our patients.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of Our Patients at Vittoria Medical Centre
