Patient Participation Group Meeting – 26 July 2017

Minutes

Present:Sandra Smith, Practice Manager. Sue Dorrington, Secretary. Katherine McClay, Patient Services Manager. Karen Wood, Patient Services Team Leader. Ian Thomason, Pharmacist.

Greg Yates – Chairperson.

Joy Verrier – Vice Chairperson.

Ian Gould - Secretary

Rob Beacham, Marian Fellows, Jane Bignell, Hope Pugh, Karen Partington, Jane Bignell.

Apologies: Jenny Rivers, Vivien Russell, Alison Lee.

Resignation: Olivia Wood

Greg thanked Olivia for her contribution to the Group and wished her well in her future endeavours.

Election of Officers:

Greg and Ian will stand again. Seconded by Joy. Approved

Rob will stand as Vice Chairperson. Seconded by Karen. Approved

1.Minutes

The minutes from the meeting of 19 April 2017 were approved.

2. Matters arising

  • Heath Lane Medical Centre has not had any contact from Clive at Boughton Health Centre regarding informal monitoring of our Practice. Therefore the Group have decided to take no further action.
  • Hope had a look at Heath Lane Medical Centre’s Facebook page and was impressed at the content. The Facebook page will be reviewed at the next meeting with a presentation on how it can be used.
  • Online services continue to be promoted and we have a slow but steady uptake for this. In due course, prescription requests will be moved to the Patient Access portal. This will be more user-friendly and patients will be able to see the status of their prescriptions.
  • Heath Lane Medical Centre’s web appointments are generally not being used heavily, so there isn’t a need to expand these appointments at the moment.
  • eConsult was due to ‘go live’ during the first week in May but this did not happen for various reasons. This initiative was devised by the Hurley Group in London. Sandra is awaiting contact from the Hurley Group to provide promotional material for this. Patient Services have been trained regarding eConsult. The patient group would be willing, in the Hub room, to introduce people to use eConsult if the issue of access to a “controlled” PC terminal could be sorted out.
  • The health machine that was located in the Community Hub has been sent back. Heath Lane Medical Centre had a free trial but the cost to the practice did not make it a feasible option to keep.

3. Heath Lane Medical Centre – Staff Update

Sandra explained that Dr Susan Wall has left the practice but she will continue to provide locum cover and minor operations clinics when needed. The practice now have one female GP, Dr Jo Cleeton. Dr Anant Mittal is now a permanent salaried GP with the practice. The practice nurses are upscaling their skill-mix to cover some gynaecological procedures.

4.Pharmacy Update

Ian attended from the Hub Pharmacy.

  • He explained that he is fully trained to administer travel vaccines and anaphylactic provision. This service is not free. Ian will only administer vaccines when Heath Lane Medical Centre cannot accommodate a patient.
  • The Hub Pharmacy will be administering flu vaccines. A discussion has taken place with the practice as the practice need to ensure that the pharmacy do not vaccinate any of our patients that could be vaccinated at the surgery.
  • Pharmacy2U – Ian explained about this internet-based pharmacy. This company is operating legally but has questionable marketing techniques. The company that owns Pharmacy2U also owns Emis. They send mail-shots to patients which look like an official NHS document. Patients then sign up to their service without really knowing what they are signing up for. The elderly are particularly vulnerable in this area. There have been many issues with this company and Ian would welcome any thoughts from the PPG members as to how this could be dealt with.
  • The Hub Pharmacy do not consult regarding the morning-after pill. The course for this is day-long (Ian has done this course but it was a long time ago and he would need a refresher).
  • Ian explained that he would like to do an audit of returned medication. He explained that to try and prevent excessive medicine prescribing that he actively encourages people to order directly with their GP online.
  • Ian explained that the Pharmacy First initiative ended in November 2016. This was a trial scheme. Tier 2 of this scheme is still in operation which involves prescription-only medication, for example, trimethoprim and creams for basic skin infections etc. Greg noted that it was a pity that the part of Pharmacy First, which encouraged people to visit their pharmacy for routine ailments rather than see the doctor, had also been dropped.

5. Patient Satisfaction Survey

The Group expressed their disappointment with the Ipsos MORI poll and do not feel it accurately represents Heath Lane Medical Centre and its Patient Services team. Heath Lane Medical Centre fell short in areas that we always fall short in. Sandra explained that we had 100 surveys returned from patients in the 45 – 65 age category. Many of these patients had not even attended the surgery within the last year.

The PPG offered to help in whatever way necessary to ascertain why our results are low in some areas. Consequently, the surgery and the PPG will concurrently run a survey, possibly in October this year, and ask the same questions as the MORI poll. Hopefully, this will provide a more accurate depiction of the views of Heath Lane Medical Centre’s patients. The PPG would also like to help examine the results of the survey in more detail to see if there was some feature of the survey method that was affecting the results. They would be seeking more detail from the compilers of the analysis. In the meantime the surgery will be actively looking at areas listed in the MORI poll. A PPG member noted that she feels that there may be certain reasons why the results were disappointing. She felt that there was a reluctance to do home visits at times and there had been difficulties getting a GP appointment recently less than two weeks ahead, therefore experiences like these could be a contributory factor.

6. GP Surveys

A Group member asked about the surveys that are given out after a GP consultation. She wanted to know how anonymous these surveys are. Sandra explained that all GP’s have to have an appraisal every year. As part of this they have to have 360° feedback from colleagues and patients. The GP’s use software called ‘Clarity’ who collate all the information. All surveys are sent back to Clarity for collating and are anonymous.

7. GP and ANP Sessions

A query was raised about how many hours the GP’s and ANP’s worked each week and whether the practice appointment patient ratio was correct. Sandra stated that the hours that the GP’s and ANP’s worked did meet the guidelines laid down in the GMS Contract. To expand - The national average of appointment scale is 72 appointments per week per 1000 patients. For Heath Lane to meet the average we would offer 504 appointment per week. As we offer 565 appointments per week across our GP and ANP’s we are above the national average. This figure does not include the various nurse, HCA and phlebotomy appointments also offered.

8.Business Plan

The business plan was reviewed by the Group and there were no matters arising. There was particular interest in the IT development plans and the performance improvement plans in the context of item 5 above.

9.Meet and Greet

This will be combined with item 5. Sandra will try and obtain a copy of the MORI poll questionnaire from NHS England to enable the practice and the Group to ask the same questions to patients. The meet and greet will take place provisionally during the week of 2 – 6 October and possibly also during the week of 9 -13 October.

When Sandra receives the information from NHS England she will communicate with Rob and Ian regarding this and form a plan of action.

10. Cluster Working

Sandra explained that there are lots of new systems coming into practice. We are clustered with Boughton, Park and Upton surgeries. We have completed work in the past within the cluster which was beneficial. There is a cluster team building meeting on 27 July at the Mercure Hotel and all Practice Managers, Senior Staff and Senior Partners will be attending this team building session. There is a possibility of the four surgeries in our cluster to be given a ‘brand’ name. For example, the surgeries in the new Fountains Medical Centre are all known as ‘The Fountains’. Sandra explained that each practice is a standalone business and there are no plans in the immediate future for Practices to merge into one.

11. Chairperson’s Meeting

Greg explained that this was an interesting day. The roll out of eConsult was covered in depth. Two senior pharmacy representatives, including Nada Baki, the operational manager of the Hub pharmacies, had discussed the important role of pharmacies in the health service provision. Ian Gould explained that there was a new initiative from September which would send the lists of medications of discharged hospital patients directly to their local pharmacy. This would allow patients to carry on obtaining medicine once the hospital supplies had run out and allow the pharmacist to monitor any problems. It transpired that Heath Lane Medical Centre did not yet know about this initiative. There is a big push within the CCG to encourage patients to book their appointments online. There is also an initiative to try and create Patient Participation Groups within practices that do not have a group. Greg is active on the Extended Hours working group and there is an initiative to try and promote this service more widely. Greg explained that the phlebotomy service at Extended Hours is not well used but other services are near to capacity. If there is an initiative to promote the Extended Hours service more widely then there must be the capacity for more appointments. Katherine explained that on many occasions, when Patient Services try and book a patient into one of these clinics, there are never any local appointments available. This may then lead to patient dissatisfaction which reflects on Heath Lane Medical Centre rather than the Extended Hours Service.

12. AOB

Karen noted that the antibacterial dispenser located by the booking-in touch-screen in the waiting room is often empty. Katherine will liaise with the cleaner about this.

Date of next Heath Lane PPG meeting:

25 October 2017

5:00 – 6:30pm

Heath Lane Medical Centre Meeting Room

Informal pre-meeting of just PPG at 4:00 pm