Patient Group Minutes of Meeting, Reports and Surveys

The minutes of the Patient Group meetings are below.

Report of the PPG meeting – 17th July 2023

At the PPG meeting in July we were joined by GP Partner, Dr Michele Giorgi and the meeting was chaired by Practice Manager, Sue Bramley.

The meeting began with a presentation from PCN Operations Manager, Shaun Egan who gave members of the PPG an overview of the PCN and his role within it. His presentation began with explaining that a Primary Care Network is made up of a group of neighbouring GP practices working with community, mental health, social care, pharmacy, hospital and voluntary services to provide a greater provision of services. PCNs typically have a patient population of 30K -50K.

Three Chequers Medical Practice is part of Sarum Trinity PCN along with Whiteparish Surgery and Downton Surgery. The overall population of Sarum Trinity PCN is 38K patients. The Clinical Director is GP Partner, Dr Michele Giorgi who is responsible for the leadership of the PCN and overseeing the delivery of the Primary Care Network contract.

As part of this contract, Sarum Trinity are currently involved in the following projects:

• Extended Access – The PCN has to provide patients with 38 hours of clinical appointments outside of the Practice working hours. These are being delivered Monday – Friday between 6.30pm & 8.00pm and Saturday 9.00am – 5.00pm
• Clinical Targets/Flu Vaccinations – Aiming to deliver 90% eligible patients with a flu vaccination
• Additional Roles – Employing Physiotherapists, Paramedics, Social Prescribers and Pharmacists through the PCN to provide patient care
• Capacity and Access Improvement plan – New telephone system, website improvement and digital innovation (RPA)
• Covid Medicines Deliver Unit (CMDU) – Patients across BANES who have Covid-19, symptomatic and have a high risk of hospitalisation are triaged to see if they are eligible for an anti-viral medication

The remainder of the meeting was used to discuss the new telephone system, appointment booking and updates around a purpose-built building for Three Chequers Medical Practice.

Sue Bramley explained that on Thursday 20^th July a new telephone system will go live and will be the initial roll out of the new system, once staff and patients are familiar with this system then the appointment booking feature will be introduced.

The new telephony system is designed to be user friendly and get patients to the right clinician in as few steps as possible. Successful systems have between 2-5 options for patients to choose from (Three Chequers currently has 4).

Three Chequers are hoping to introduce patients to alternative routes of care or assistance depending on their concern; in some cases, there might be an alternative clinician that is more specialised and better suited to help the patient. For example 10% of triage calls are MSK related, therefore they should be requesting a Physiotherapist appointment.

We explained to PPG members that we are hoping to encourage patients who are willing and able to use Online Services to book appointments through this method; this will free up the telephone system for those who do not have access to Online Services. As a Practice, we are currently working to make more appointment slots available online so that patients can book appointments with Nurses and other Allied Health Professionals through SystmOnline.

We discussed that patients not attending pre-booked appointments is an increasing issue at the Practice, the process was explained to the PPG and if patients fail to attend 4 appointments within a 12 month period then they are at risk of being removed from the Practice list.

We explained that when patients are contacted when they have missed their appointment, most patients do not seem genuinely sorry or are not bothered that they have missed their appointment and wasted the appointment slot.

When patients do not attend their appointment or they cancel less than an hour before their slot it is a waste of Practice resources. The appointments that have the highest DNA rate are nursing appointments for wound care which are around 40 minute slots each, given an appropriate amount of notice, these slot could be used for patients who need them. One 40 minute slot can be converted into 3 ECG slots or 8 blood test appointments.

We updated the PPG members on the search for a purpose-built space for Three Chequers Medical Practice. The idea being that each floor/area could be designated to a department and patients would go to specific floor depending on their type of appointment, ie dressings with the Nurse would be ground floor; but everyone would be under one roof.

Whilst we have not been successful in securing a building to house all of our staff so far, the search continues to find an appropriate space for the Practice.

The Practice Manager closed the meeting and thanked members for joining. The next meeting will be held in the latter part of the year.

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