As part of the changes in the NHS we were advised to form a Patient Reference Group (PRG). The members of this group are patients from our practice who are interested in helping us to develop priorities for the practice. The group included Whites, Blacks and Asian. The percentage of group members was different to our practice population due to the small no of patients in the group.

We decided to continue with the PRG formed last year. As in the previous year we communicated via email.

We used the same questionnaire developed last year for this year’s survey.

These questionnaires were handed to patients who attended the surgery during one week period.

The responses for the questions were transferred to an Excel sheet and analysed.

The survey report was very encouraging and most patients were satisfied with the service provided. There were several free text comments made by the patient. Based on this information the following action plan was produced:

• Continue to maintain the easy and early appointments offered to the patients. These had been commented by most of the patients surveyed and by others when they attend the surgery. Even though there is lot of effort involved to provide this efficient service we will continue to maintain this
• Encourage the new partner to increase the sessions to cope with the increasing demand
• Set up online appointment and repeat prescription system. All the staff now are trained to use this service provided by In Practice system who is our clinical system supplier. We have sent some emails to patients and will continue to register more patients for this. This will make it easy for the patients and reception staff. This works differently from the current system we are using and much easier for the practice team. We will continue to run both systems until all the patients are transferred to the new system