Welcome to the patient section of the site. The aim of the section is to provide patients with an area of the site that looks at their thoughts and concerns about the practice. Online forms and a comments box, means patients can easily post comments about the practice to help improve our services further.

Named Accountable GP

All our Patients have been allocated an accountable GP. Please ask at the Reception if you wish to know who your accountable GP is. Please note this does not affect your rights to see any doctor of your choice depending on their availability at the time.

Patient Participation Group Report 2014

DES PPG Report 2014 now available in pdf format

Results of our recent patient satisfaction survey

February 2012

Firstly we would like to start by thanking all the patients who took part in our survey your comments and opinions matter to us.

Following discussions with our Patient Participation Group regarding comments and complaints we have recently received from patients regarding our current appointment systems we agreed to look at ways to improve this. We therefore conduct a survey of patients attending the surgery between 13th February – 2nd March. The aim was to find out how patients rated our current appointment systems and whether we should continue offering open surgery every morning or just pre-booked appointments.

Patients were asked to complete a questionnaire, we had 255 respondents.

The following questions were answered as follow:

1. Age range of respondents

1% - Under 16
7% - 17 – 25 years
18% - 26 – 40 years
41% - 41 – 60 years
33% - 60+

2. Numbers of years registered with the Practice

6% - less than 1 year
6% - 1 – 2 years
18% - 3 – 6 years
71% - 7+ years

3. In the past 12 months how many times have you seen a doctor from this Practice?

2% - None
27% - 1 – 2 times
30% - 3 – 4 times
41% - 5+ times

4. OPEN ACCESS
This Practice operates an Open Access Surgery each morning when no appointments are necessary

a. Have you attended the open access surgery?
Yes 67% 
No 33%

b. Did you ask to see a specific Doctor? 
Yes 59% 
No 41%

c Did you see the doctor of you choice?
Yes 75%
No 25%

d. If no were you given an explanation? 
Yes 22%
No 13%
N/A 66%

e How do you rate the time you had to wait?

Very poor 4%
Poor 5%
Fair 20% Very poor – Fair 31%
Good 29%
Very Good 26%
Excellent 16.5% Good – Excellent 69%

f How do you rate the open access surgery overall?

Very poor 1%
Poor 2%
Fair 11% Very poor - Fair 14%
Good 24%
Very Good 26%
Excellent 36% Good – Excellent 86%

6. PRE-BOOKED SCHEDULED APPOINTMENTS

a Have you attended a pre-booked appointment in the past 12 months?

Yes 86%
No 14%

b. When booking how quickly did get an appointment?

Same day 15%
Next Day 18%
2 days 37% Within 2 days - 70%
3 days 13%
4-5 days 11%
More 6% More than 2 days - 30%

c. Did you see the doctor of your choice? 
Yes 84%
No 16%

d. When attending a pre-booked appointment how long do you usually have to wait at the practice after your appointment time before you consultation begins?

Not at all, they begin on time 1%
Less than 5 minutes 15%
6 – 10 minutes 41% Up to 10 mins 57%
11- 20 minutes 25%
21 – 30 minutes 12%
More than 30 minutes 6% More than 10 mins 43%

e. How do you rate this?

Very poor 0%
Poor 7%
Fair 35% Very poor - Fair 42%
Good 33%
Very Good 18%
Excellent 7% Good - Excellent 58%

f How do you rate the pre-booked schedule appointment service overall?

Very poor 1%
Poor 6%
Fair 18% Very poor - Fair 25%
Good 41%
Very Good 18%
Excellent 16% Good - Excellent 75%

8. PLEASE ADD ANY FURTHER COMMENTS. 
Your comments are valuable to us.

50 (19.5%) of patients provided additional comments, as follows

COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS

POSTITIVE (30 Comments 60%)

• Nice doctors and staff
• Keep up the good work and thank you
• All the doctors in the surgery are brilliant, always taking time to listen without rushing you out the door.
• I find this practice excellent good receptionist and doctors
• Staff are always pleasant and helpful
• The reception staff are a great asset and have been especially helpful during a very difficult year for my family.
• Staff are friendly and courteous
• Reception staff are very good, helpful and friendly
• Think receptionists work hard here and not sure how much thanks they get! Thank You.
• Excellent service from all receptionist, nurses and doctors all helpful, friendly and reassuring
• Although there is a wait on several occasions at the practice the service is excellent
• I feel the appointment system and open access are very good
• Keep up the good work
• All the doctors here are needed and are excellent
• No problems everyone is polite and helpful
• You have got an exemplary service, polite receptionists, empathic and supportive doctors. Keep it up. Thank you
• Present service is ideal. Thank you
• All good
• I am glad you have open access every morning. Thank you
• Very pleasant surgery and good access to doctors and nurses
• Open access is brilliant as you know a child can be seen on the same day
• This is the best practice we have been registered with, open access is great.
• I find this surgery to be excellent, if I need to be seen quickly I am accommodated.
• The reception staff are excellent they do a hard job. Patient care is excellent
• Excellent surgery and very pleasant reception and nursing staff
• I think the practice is very very good, very pleasant and very helpful from all staff and doctors
• Doctors, nurses and staff very caring and polite
• Open access works really well. 
• A good surgery 
• Very good

NEGATIVE (13 Comments - 26%)

• No one tells you from reception that a doctor is running late
• Patients shouldn’t have to wait ages when they have a booked appointment
• Only issues is waiting times with work commitments this is difficult
• Wait is too long for pre-booked appointments
• Open access is not convenient when you are working
• Regards open access you have to come really early to book an appointment then come back again this is not good when you have a sick child
• Think open access is not good wait is far too long
• Phone system extremely poor, very difficult to get through to make an appointment
• When you have a booked appointment do not expect to have to wait nearly an hour for your appointment
• Difficult to book an appointment as phone is constantly engaged
• Had to use open access as could not book an appointment with a lady doctor
• Open access is an awful idea, it is degrading to have to wait outside for the surgery to open when you are ill. Patients are your customers! Treat them as people
• Hopefully you will address the open access surgery and recognise the need to see a GP when needed or when it is appropriate to an individuals needs

SUGGGESTIONS (7 Comments - 14%)

• Appointments should start on time or a least within 10 minutes 
• Not to make patients wait for ages
• More appointments that you can book instead of having to wait in open access in the morning as difficult to get time off work
• More evening appointments as can’t attend in the morning because of work
• The ability to book an appointment via text or email would be good as I am hard of hearing. Otherwise no complaints, staff are always polite and helpful
• What about online access to appointments
• I feel that staff and doctors are always inundated by us patients and therefore I often feel, through experience that they need more staff and doctors to help them with the pressure of our demands.

ACTION 
The results were discussed with the Patient Group on 6th March 2012

• As a result of the responses to our satisfaction survey we will continue to operate both open access and pre-booked appointments each morning.

• We appreciate the problems that result for patients when the surgeries run late and the doctors and staff are looking at ways to avoid this. -One option being considered is to have 2 – 3 GPs running open access surgeries and the rest all pre-bookable appointments. At present they have a mixture of both systems.

• We note that 43% of patients attending a pre-booked appointment reported having to wait more that 10 minutes after their appointment time to be seen. We will investigate this and see what action can be taken to avoid these. .

• We also appreciate the need to keep patients informed when surgeries are running late and this will also be addressed. The patient arrival screen also informs patients if the doctor’s appointments are running late when they arrive themselves,

• To review the possibility of being able to book appointments online

• From 1st April we will be undertaking an additional surgery on a Wednesday evening. Thus offering more pre-bookable appointments.

• We are currently in process of employing additional reception staff to improve our service to you.

• In regards to more having more appointments available we are sorry to have to say this but in the two weeks that the survey was conducted we had

123 DNAs (on average = 8 surgeries lost)
That is 123 patients who booked appointments but failed to attend, these are wasted appointments that could have been offered to other patients. Please let us know if you can’t attend your appointment so we can offer the appointment to someone else.

Patient Participation Group
Group members include 16 patients 3 staff members and a doctor. We would welcome new members. The next meeting will be held on Wednesday 2nd May 2012 at 1 pm here in the surgery. The meetings last approxmately 1 hour.

TERMS OF REFERENCE 
Purpose of the group:-
- To be a patient voice
- To provide a link service for patients with the practice – advocacy role.
- Support the practice with new developments
- Provide feedback to the practice 
- Provide suggestions on how patient services could be improved

Organisation of meetings:-
- It was agreed that the practice would organise the meetings; agree date, time, location and inform all members before meeting requesting agenda items. 
- It was agreed that the practice would take notes and distribute them to group members

.-It was agreed that we should rotate day / time of meeting in order to ensure certain groups of patients aren’t excluded from attending.

Advertisement of Group / encouraging membership:-
- It was agreed that posters should be erected at the practice .
- It was agreed that we should actively encourage more patients to join the group.
.

Ground Rules:-
We discussed and agreed the need for these and have agreed ground rules for the group are:-
o Agenda items and discussions should be set against the purpose of the group
o The group will meet every 8 weeks and meetings should last no longer than 1 hour
o The day and time of the meeting will rotate in order to encourage inclusion
o All group members should listen and respect views of others even if the disagree
o No personal problems / relationships should be discussed at group meetings.
o The group will not be used as a forum to resolve individual patient’s problems – these should be done outside of the meeting through discussions with the practice manager.