Lee Road Surgery

Patient Reference Group (PRG)

Minutes of Meeting

Thursday 1st October 2015

Attendees:

Dr Jackie Urwin

Dr Sandeep Kapur

Miss Tara Finnie

Mrs P Phillips

Mr A Phillips

Mrs A Craft

Mr R Kershaw

Professor R Saxton

Apologies:

Ms T Cahill

Mrs C Melia

Mrs C Wilson

Mrs S Yeomans

Mr P Fearfield

Mrs K Saxena

Mrs C Gurpinar

Mrs H Oldman

Miss A Johnson

Mr A Armitage

Ms J Reason

  1. Review of surgery Action Plan 2015
  • Management of surgery environment

The waiting room chairs have now been replaced with wipeable chairs.

There are new foot operated bins in the toilets and clinical rooms.

There is a new waste bin in the waiting room.

We still need to provide an external bin.

We have obtained quotes for new flooring in the waiting room and hallway.

  • Health promotion

We will continue to promote the three NHS Cancer Screening Programmes:

  • The NHS Breast Screening Programme.
  • The NHS Cervical Screening Programme.
  • The NHS Bowel Cancer Screening Programme.

Further information on these programmes can be found at:

  • Electronic Prescribing Service (EPS)

The reception staff have been given additional training on the EPS.

The surgery is working collaboratively with Paydens Pharmacy (Beechcroft) and cross visits have taken place. This has helped the pharmacist and team to understand how we process prescription requests and our staff to understand what happens once the request has left the surgery. This has helped us to iron out a couple of issues, such as the pharmacy having problems retrieving requests from the spine (The spine is the central database where all patient data is stored), and has also helped to build our relationships with the pharmacy team. We will be looking at carrying out the same process with other local pharmacies.

Dr Kapur asked the group if they had noticedan improvement in the service. Those that use EPS agreed that the service appeared to be running smoothly.

  • Appointments

Our GP appointments have increased by two clinics a week.

We have also slightly adjusted our nurse clinics so that we have more nursing appointments available.

Dr Urwin asked the group how they were finding booking appointments. It was agreed that there are no problems booking an appointment, either online or via the telephone.

2551(23%) patients are registered for online appointment booking. 2549 (23%) patients are registered to request repeat prescriptions online.

The chart below shows a breakdown of patients that use the online service for booking appointments by age and gender.

  1. Patient Survey

It was agreed that as we now have four sources of patient feedback, we will not be repeating the in-house patient survey this year. The four sources of feedback are:

  • The National GP Patient Survey
  • NHS Choices
  • Surgery comments box
  • The Friends and Family Test

The National GP Patient Survey results were based on 97 replies, a 37% response rate. The results of the survey were discussed:

  • Preferred GP: It may not always be possible to speak to your preferred GP on a given day as a number of our GP’s are part time. Where this is the case you will always be able to speak to the duty doctor.
  • Opening times: We offer commuter surgeries on Tuesdays and Thursdays for patients who prefer to be seen outside of working hours. The surgery does not plan to open 7 days a week, however, it is possible that Lewisham Neighbourhood practices may offer GP services 7 days a week for our patients. This might mean a collection of Lewisham GP’s working from one local surgery on Saturdays and Sundays. We will communicate more on this as the service develops. SELDOC is still offering an out of hours service for our patients and we would expect more locally based clinics to be up and running within the next 1-2 years.

It was suggested that the Friends and Family Test was handed out by GP’s during clinics to try and raise the number of responses. This is something we have thought about, however, as appointments are limited to 10 minutes it was felt that this would detract from clinical time offered to our patients.

Other forms of feedback were discussed i.e. via the surgery newsletter, online, via email. It was generally agreed that the four sources of feedback were sufficient and to ask for further feedback would be too time consuming for the surgery and would become a nuisance to patients.

  1. Update on staff changes

Nurse Anne Tully left the surgery in March 2015.

Nurse Lesley Grant joined the surgery in March 2015.

Dr Harpreet Malhi returned from maternity leave in April 2015.

Dr William Elson will be staying at the surgery until December 2015.

Dr Robert Lumb retired at the end of September 2015 after 30 years at Lee Road.

Dr Wing Chu will be joining the surgery on 6th October 2015.

Dr Chu qualified from Kings, London, in 2009

His specialist area is sports medicine

He will be working at the surgery on Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s

  1. Any other business
  • Sainsbury’s pharmacy

Professor Saxton highlighted that Sainsbury’s pharmacy is being taken over by Lloyds Pharmacy. We hope that this will not affect the service they offer. Dr Kapur advised everyone that Paydens Pharmacy offer the same services as Sainsbury’s including a home delivery service Monday to Saturday.

  • PRG meetings

It has become increasingly difficult to get enough members to attend the PRG meetings to make them worthwhile. We have tried to encourage attendance by arranging evening meetings, however, we have had less interest in these than for daytime meetings. Dr Urwin raised the possibility of running virtual meetings where papers were circulated and discussions held electronically. It was suggested that this would make the group feel disconnected. It was commented that we should view low attendance as a positive as it generally means that people are happy with the service we provide.

It was agreed that we would continue to hold meetings face to face as well as circulating papers to those that want to be virtual members of the PRG. We will develop an advertising campaign to try and recruit more members.