Patient Participation Group

Held on Tuesday 24^th May 2022 at 6:30pm.

Present:

• Dr Jairam Kaasula, GP partner
• Scott Wellington, patient
• Dr Mamta Chada, GP partner
• Sue Brown, patient
• Jean Wellington, practice nurse
• Helen Randall, patient
• Karen Malecki, practice manager
• Elaine Dainty, operations manager

Apologies:

• Stacey Evely, patient
• Diana Grina, patient

Welcome and introductions

KM welcomed the group and each member introduced themselves

Covid

Practice update – latest guidance

Government guidelines still require masks to be worn by patients, visitors and staff in the surgery, together with PPE as and when appropriate although social distancing rules have ceased. Practice staff are also required to still test twice weekly regardless of whether they are symptomatic and these results are uploaded on the practice intranet. Stringent infection control has been fully implemented as a result of the pandemic.

 Vaccine success – Gloucestershire

Gloucestershire is in the top 10 in the county in terms of uptake and delivery of the vaccination programme.

NHS update

HQ Primary Care Network – Overview

KM advised we are now part of a Primary Care Network (PCN), meaning we have joined together with Hadwen Medical Centre to provide various services across our areas. This enables us to share resources in order to bolster up the work already provided by GPs. New roles within this PCN will be outlined below.

PCN projects – Frailty

This is a focussed piece of work being undertaken by the PCN. It will specifically target all patients who are 75 and above, on multiple medications and who are subject to unplanned admissions due to falls etc. This project will enable resources to provide follow up care and put plans in place to help prevent falls and admissions and to undertake regular medication reviews of our frail patients.

Staff

New Organisational Structure. These roles are new to QMC during the past 12 months

• Practice manager – Karen Malecki
• Operations manager – Elaine Dainty
• Care coordinators – Jackie Mulhall and Olivia Couston. This role supports both GPs and patients. The CC’s can chase up referrals and appointments, offer support to patients to help signpost to various organisations eg: dementia, cancer charities, carers hubs etc. We also have a local care home for people with learning disabilities and they visit weekly to liaise with the manager and then report back to the GPs if there are any issues that need flagging up
• Clinical pharmacists – Clive Fisher and Reenal Patel (Reenal is provided by the CCG as an additional resource)
• Registrars – This is a 6 month rotational role. We currently have Dr Rachel Underhill. She will be leaving in August and another registrar will join shortly thereafter
• Medical students – We are a training practice and have medical students in on Wednesdays and Thursdays each week
• Physician associates – This is relatively new concept but has been active in the USA for many years. It is very similar to the Nurse Practitioner role
• Physiotherapist (PCN) – Sarah Green
• Social prescribers (PCN) – Ian Preston and Leia Pennell
• Pharmacy technician (PCN) – Lilyana Knight

Premises

New extension at QMC

We are in the process of having an extension built – single storey to the right, double storey to the left and a storage facility to the rear. There has been some delay but the builders are planning to start on 6^th June.  We will send out messages to all our patients and update our website accordingly. The PPG members were then shown the plans and drawings outlining proposed works. It is an exciting time for the practice but we are aware it will also be extremely challenging at the same time.

NHS IT systems

Online patient access/Footfall/Dashboard/EConsult/Practice Website

There has been a good uptake for patients to register for online access. This enables them to order medication, view their records and recent test results.

We have been advised by CCG that they are decommissioning EConsult at the end of May so patients will now use Footfall/Dashboard as a way of contacting the practice as an alternative to making a phone call. This is also a very effective tool and is also being used alongside EConsult at present.  The practice website will

Social media

We are in the process of opening a QMC Facebook account. This will be used predominantly as a broadcasting platform in order to keep our patients updated with changes and information and promote public health awareness programmes. This will be going live in the next couple of weeks.

Message link

The practice has commissioned a telephone answering service called Message Link. The telephones automatically divert to this service at 18:00 each night in order for the team to finish their tasks; prepare the practice for surgery the next day and to implement the lock up process securely. Patients can still access the surgery via an emergency line and the front door also remains open until 18:30. The feedback from staff has been very positive to this and the PPG confirmed they were happy with us using this service.

Quality

Veterans accreditation

KM advised that we have received the award as a veteran friendly practice. This means that any patients who are veterans or serving military personnel, together with their families, will be flagged up so we are aware they may need some extra support and sensitivity around their care. We will also post information on our website and subsequent Facebook page signposting these patients to any charities and support groups required.

Care Quality Commission Update (CQC)

We have been advised that we will be having an imminent inspection by the CQC. The date at the time of this meeting was given as 8^th June, however this has been pushed back to 22^nd June as they were unaware of the building work starting at the same time. KM advised the criteria has changed in recent times and will be heavily focussed on staff feedback, policies and Significant Events reporting and learning. The PPG have agreed that they are happy to be contacted by the CQC to give any feedback required.

Community links

MC advised that 40% of our patients are under the age of 25. With this in mind we are looking to forge links with our local community to help promote health awareness and public health initiatives. It would be good to engage with some of the local schools and get them involved. We will be speaking to our social prescribers to discuss the best ways of getting this started.

AOB

SB asked about our DNA rate since returning to normal ways of working since the pandemic. JRK advised that this was higher than pre-pandemic days particularly our nurse’s smear appointments. Discussion took place around the best way to highlight the importance of these health checks and again, this will be promoted on our social media page and website. For all other DNA’s, we have a policy in place which is shared with patients who regularly miss their appointments and a message is added to their notes.

We thanked the PPG for their time and it was agreed another meeting will be held once the building work has been completed.

Date of next meeting: Tuesday 6^th September 2022.

Priorities agreed with the PPG

Access

There is increasing number of patients registering with our practice. We try to maintain easy access to patients offering same day or next day appointments in most of the cases. The increasing list size is causing pressure on the practice with available appointments. The PPG was concerned about this.

The practice is interviewing and hoping to appoint additional doctors to start from September 2015. In the meantime there is a regular locum working in the practice.

Repeat prescriptions

Making it easy for the patients to order repeat prescriptions, book appointment and also reduce the face to face exposure to reception staff.

Patients coming to the surgery to order repeat prescriptions is causing increased work load to the reception staff and also sometimes the patients will have to wait on the phone or at the front desk for long to book appointments, order or collect prescriptions.

Our practice has Joined the Vision online services. This is a better system for ordering repeat prescriptions than the previous system. This let the patient access their repeat prescription list and choose the drugs required. In addition they are able to pre book appointments and cancel appointments. If you would like to use this service, please register for online services by completing our online form.

Communicating information to patients

This was identified by the practice. There are so many notices displayed in the waiting room. Some of them are important but difficult for the patients to see. We wanted to try and display all the information in one place

We used to have a TV screen displaying various useful information for the patients. This was not used for nearly 2 years after the supplier stopped trading. We set up a PC to transmit useful data to the TV in the waiting area. This was able to use only a power point presentation. Fortunately the CCG is funding display screen to be installed in the surgery and this will make it much easier and will provide variety of health information including health promotion.

This will help us to communicate important messages like vaccination schedules, health promotion information etc. to the patients.

Patient report 2014

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