Sloan Medical Centre

Minutes of Patient Participation Group

Meeting held on Monday 10th June 2013

Present:

On behalf of practice Dr Ollie Hart (OH), Helen Proud (HP), Dr David Greenstreet (DG), Dr Marion Sloan (MES)

Patients – M Moudnani, R Cowley, Roy Cowley, S Grammenou, C Smith, C Hague, B Wright,

P Hartley (PH), M Simpkin, I Bannor, S Hazlehurst, D Hughes, K Hirst, A Wilkin, F McVeigh

Previous Minutes

PH would like the paragraph regarding physioworks completely removing from the minutes.

No agenda for this meeting as the topic for discussion will be the telephone triage access system the practice is currently trialling.

A short presentation by DG on demand v capacity on national averages and also figures collected here at the practice. The practice held a meeting where we asked the staff, nurses and doctors for their thoughts on the system so far. Most staff felt that the system was easier for patients to gain access to a doctor than the old system.

OH asked for patients present for their comments, problems and feedback

 AW – Patients should have been asked about this – The PPG were consulted at last meeting

 SG – Not very private if a doctor is calling you back at home and you don’t want your family to know what is wrong with you.

 Many patients present felt that initial access via telephone is still a problem, some patients not able to get through before the cut off time – Practice needs to look into this

 RA - Has recently tried 13 times to get through to the surgery via telephone but only been successful 5 times, again the practice will be looking into ways of easier access via telephone

 SG suggested we could ask patients how urgent they feel their problem is, do they want face to face or would they like telephone triage?

 FM – feels that triage was tried and tested years ago in the NHS and it didn’t work back then

 MM – asked about how she would go about booking a triage slot as a patient who is hard of hearing and on the practices list of patients who can book appts directly over reception if she didn’t feel well enough to come down to surgery? – HP suggested she could email or text our text to cancel number to arrange an appointment although this wouldn’t be used in urgent cases.

 AW – Have we looked at consultation rates? We do provide enough access according to the average stats however our demand is way above average

 RC – feels there are not enough people answering the telephones especially in a morning, his wife couldn’t get through at all for a whole day

 MS – Asked what process have we got in place for patients with long term conditions could we provide some sort of nurse follow up appointment?

 FM – Should patients with asthma and COPD be made to wait in the waiting room?

 SH – Asked how we communicated the changes to the patients – HP due to short notice between the practice’s decision to go ahead with this trial and the start date we advertised it on our website (front page), Large flip chart sized poster at reception and on the right hand side of prescriptions – suggestion was could we put it on the message patients get when phoning in? – Practice will look into the greeting message on telephones

 Could we have the queuing system which a lot of companies use e.g. “you are 3 rd in the queue”? Patients may not get as frustrated if they are aware how long they may be waiting.

 Could we still have some pre bookable appointments? – HP will contact the telecommunications company to enquire about this

 Patients who do not attend their appointments should be penalised as this is nor fair to patients who always attend

The partners present thanked all patients for their contributions to the meeting. The plan now is to put all comments and suggestions from this meeting and the staff meeting together and present it at the next business meeting. Date and Time of next meeting is Monday 9th September 6.15pm – 7.15pm.