Abbey Field Medical Centre
Patient Group Minutes – Thursday 20 April 2017 @6.30pm
Attendees
Nicky Young (Practice Manager), Edith Dow, Ryamond Whiting, Fred Harvey, Elizabeth Bezzant, Merle Johnson, Barbara Breadman,
Apologies
Christine Ward, Steven McDonough, Vi Haddow
Minutes
The minutes from the previous meeting were agreed.
Practice Update
We are really pleased Dr Josh Arkley is joining the Practice in June – he will be a full time GP based mainly at Abbey Field.
Emma Gamble, our Nurse Practitioner, is leaving. She has been a great asset to the Practice. She is moving to Mersea Island Practice – pursuing her dream career working with both the Practice and ACE to look after elderly patients. We are currently advertising for 1 or 2 Nurse Practitioners.
June Schofield, Nurse Practitioner at Hawthorn, left shortly after we merged to go to East Bergholt Practice. However we were really lucky Linda Smith was able to join the Practice. Linda comes with a wealth of knowledge and experience and is able to provide appointments every day at the Hawthorn site.
Dementia Coffee Morning
The Dementia Coffee morning on the 6 May was not very well attended – but we do know that those who came and sort advice etc. were very appreciative. We also ran a clinic for Senior Health Checks at the same time and these were really popular.
Opening on a Saturday
The nurses are working together to run clinics 1 x a month on Saturday to increase accessibility – we may try and theme these e.g. around womens health etc. We know these appointments will be very popular especially for the working population.
Hawthorn Practice
We merged from the 1 April 2017. The patient list has been shared amongst each of the Partners. The Partners are undertaking reviews of any patient on any medication – approximately 800 patients each to review. Much other work is being undertaken – everything from the Registration, Referral, Audit and Script processes are being looked at – we are looking at the processes run at each site and deploying the most efficient and effective processes.
Pharmacy
Building of the pharmacy should commence in June/July. As you can imagine this has involved a little bit of moving around of the Administration/Reception and Secretarial Teams. We no longer have a Conference room as this is used by the secretaries. The rest of the Teams, including the Practice Manager, will be concertinaed into smaller spaces. However, it is hoped there will be long term benefits of having an on site pharmacists for the patients and for the practice.
Phlebotomy
It is acknowledged there have been problems for some time with the phlebotomy service at Ipswich – these are all being investigated. It has meant some inconvenience for patients as, in some instances, they have had to have their blood taken 2/3 times.
Thank you to everyone who was able to attend the meeting.
Date of Next Meetings:
Thursday 20 April 2017 @ 6.30pm
Thursday 15 June 2017 @ 6.30pm
Thursday 14 September 2017 @ 6.30pm
Thursday 23 November 2017 @ 6.30pm