Summer/Autumn Newsletter 2006

Doctors

Congratulations to Dr Alex Armstrong on his election as a Fellow of The Royal College Of General Practitioners and also to Dr Steve Comber on becoming a Member of the Royal College Of General Practitioners. Congratulations also to Dr Jenny Verity on being made a Fellow of the Faculty of Family Planning. Dr Verity is a Family Planning Instructor for other doctors and there are only a select number of Fellows of this faculty.

Dr Jenny Verity has also announced that she plans to retire from the Practice in May 2007. She has been a partner here since 1983.

Dr Mike Rossiter has decided to reduce his time at the Practice to two days a week so that he can spend more time in his specialist area of Sports and Exercise medicine. The Practice is advertising for a doctor to replace his time and he will reduce down to two days a week as soon as one has been appointed.

Staff

With the introduction of new targets and ways of working within Primary Care, the Practice is slowly, but surely, reorganising the way our staff work to cater for this. Hopefully, this will improve our efficiency, make the running of the Practice smoother and continue to offer a high level of service to our patients.

Missed appointments

We are well aware that it has been increasingly difficult to get a routine appointment at the Practice (see below). However, this has not been helped by the fact that between the end of April and end of July there has been a staggering 1079 missed appointments! This does not include patients who ring and cancel minutes before their appointment with no time for the staff to book someone else in. This figure represents 8.3% of all appointments with a doctor or nurse in that time period and is equivalent to a whole week of appointments missed!

We are trying our best to improve routine access to see a doctor or nurse but without reducing the number of missed appointments, our efforts are worthless.

Please, if you are unable to attend your appointment let the reception staff know in advance so that it can be offered to someone else.

Persistent offenders will be contacted and removed from the Practice List.

Triage

Our telephone triage service has become a victim of its own success! By having this service, we are able to offer an "on the day" appointment with either a doctor or nurse but, as this service is so busy the number of routine appointments has gone down and patients have to wait an unreasonable length of time for this. Therefore on one hand we satisfy the government's target of seeing patients within 48 hours but we feel that patients wanting a non-urgent appointment have to wait unreasonably long.

As a result we are planning to introduce the following to improve our service:

• An automated telephone answering service which will improve the time taken to answer your call and deal with it appropriately. Don't worry! This will not be an endless option of numbers but a simple system of choosing between triage and routine enquiries.
• The introduction of "drop-in" clinics. These will be for patients assessed by our triage team to have a problem that can be seen in a morning assessment clinic the next day rather than be seen the same day. The clinic will have both doctor and nurse input and will be on a "first come, first served" basis.
• Specialist clinics - these are already running but patients will be given more encouragement to attend these clinics regularly, if they have a chronic disease, rather than see their own doctor in a routine appointment.

Physiotherapist

Heather Beattie runs a regular private clinic at our surgery in Tidworth. She can be contacted directly (details via reception) or through your GP/

Flu Jabs

Yes, the time is once again fast approaching! All "at risk" patients will be contacted by the Practice to make an appointment. However, please be aware that the Department of Health have informed all Practices that there is likely to be a delay in the delivery of the vaccine this year as the laboratories have had difficulty producing the correct vaccine for this year. At this stage, please do not book an appointment until you have been contacted.

Thank you for reading this newsletter, any constructive comments about the Practice would be welcomed.

August 2006 - Previous newsletters

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