Meeting Minutes

Around 10 people attended the meeting held on 12^th May at our Edgeley site.  The main focus of discussion was around wanting to formally start a “Patient Participation Group” that meets regularly face to face to discuss issues within the practice.

The main points discussed were:

–  Forming a Group

• We discussed the ideas behind forming a Patient Participation Group and what we wanted to achieve with it going forward
• We said that we want to have a face in the community where we can promote health services within Stockport.
• Ideas included things like training days at schools/sports centres or at the practice. The training could include things like CPR and life saving techniques.
• It would be good if we make sure that both children and adults can participate in these events and also come away with some useful knowledge.
• We wanted to be able to speak to the group regarding changes that we were making and ask for their thoughts before we implement anything. An example would be if we were changing the extended opening hours or were planning to stay open earlier/later and we wanted to find the PPG’s opinion. Another might be if we were inviting patients for screening, the PPG could help us engage with patients better.
• We will also be contacting other practices PPG groups to get an idea as to how they began and what helped them come together.

–  Missed Appointments

• The issue of patients missing appointments was discussed again.
• Text messaging reminders work, but only if the patient has the correct phone number on our system!
• We decided that when patients come to the desk at reception we will make sure that all contact details are checked with the patient to make sure that everything is up to date.
• We can analyse the appointments that are missed and make more of an effort to engage with patients that are continually repeat offending to see if there is anything we can help with.
• We discussed the three strike rule and we all agreed that there are obviously many special cases that prevent us from enforcing this in some cases.

–  Where We’re Headed

• We discussed a bit about what’s in the pipeline for us at Stockport Medical Group
• It was said that in the news there is an idea that Manchester is trending more towards the idea of triaging all incoming GP calls before forwarding them to the correct practices/services as required but we said that this is not where Stockport CCG was heading.
• We are looking at working with other practices in the area in order to provide the best possible experience for all patients within Stockport but this is in early stages at the moment and when we get more information about this we will make sure to communicate it to everyone.      

–  Notice Boards

• One of our notice boards has become easier to read! But there is still a lot of work to be done on them.
• Discussed using them for appropriate content
• Also we are going to make sure that the additional posters around reception windows/entrances are maintained and kept up to date and relevant

–  Advertisement

• Advertisement is something that we want to begin doing as a practice and with the help of the group.
• We discussed that this is NOT to advertise ourselves specifically as we are not able to do this.
• It would be to advertise health services within Stockport. Education around being able to stay fit and healthy. First aid training etc.
• We want to advertise what is available for people in Stockport to help prevent any serious illnesses in the future.

–  Additional

• The website is improving but still finding that people will not know about things like this until they ask at reception.
• There was a worry with things leaning towards online access more and more that people who didn’t have access to a computer would be excluded as time goes on.
• We need to make sure we are offering the same opportunities to everyone. We still need to use letters and telephone to make sure that everyone can have their say.

Plan for the future:

As we want to be involving patients in the care that we provide we are going to begin inviting the patient group to discuss more of the decisions within the practice. We can send out emails whenever we are changing something and see what kind of a response we get as to whether this is helpful or not.

One patient has set us up a Facebook page which can be found here and we hope that we can get some likes and comments. We can use this along with our website to communicate changes etc within the practice and gather feedback from patients.

We have set ourselves up on Twitter which we can use to tweet regular updates on opening hours/closures/new clinics etc. We can also link this to our website so you can see recent tweets on our homepage. I will send out the details for this next week once completely sorted.

Hopefully all this will get a bit more interaction going and over the coming weeks we will be in contact more often to try bounce any new ideas we have off you all!

Thanks everyone for attending and we’ll see you all again soon!

We had an attendance at the Delamere Practice of around 10 patients and was held at our Delamere Practice. Initially we discussed the previous meeting that was held at our Edgeley site in May before moving onto other areas reviewed below 

Appointments

We discussed that it was a balancing act between the amount of on the day and pre-bookable appointments that are available.

Telephone appointments were discussed and it was stated that this might not be obviously available to members of our practice. Promotion of this might be needed.

Members did say that the telephone triage system worked very well. We discussed the possibility of making some of these appointments available to book online.

One member was told that they could not leave a message for the doctors at reception. This is not true and we wanted to make sure that all reception staff know the procedures for this.

Missed appointments rate has dropped following our changes but it is still not good. We need to continue encouraging attendance.

Online Appointments

It was stated that it would be useful to be able to see the working hours of each GP as it was often difficult to book in to see the same one each time. We discussed the issues around changing hours and holidays etc but agreed that a page on usual working days would be beneficial on our website.

Computerised Records

Members asked how their information is recorded and who it is available to etc. We stated that everything is stored locally and only shared with permissions. Records from outside the country are not available unless brought over when the patient moves here.

Doctors

Members of the group were unsure of the amount of work that the Doctors undertake daily.

12000 patients at this practice, again, surprised a lot of people.

People were interested in the demographic differences between the practices (EMP younger, DP older etc).

We tried to explain a little bit about what a working day entails along with the any extra or unforeseen work that comes in.

Patient Surveys

We discussed the amount of surveys that go out yearly to patients.

Along with other non-NHS surveys people are beginning to feel all “surveyed out”!

We discussed the national survey that went out to patients this year and the response rate/amount of surveys sent out.

The results of this survey can be found here: https://gp-patient.co.uk/practices/P88632

Phone Lines

Again this was brought up as there are still problems with getting through.

We are still unsure on the timing of when we will get a new phone system which will incorporate phone queuing but it is in process.

Prescribing

Members were interested in the medication changes that we make (different types of the same medication) and the doctors explained a bit about this and the fact that most changes occur in rarer drugs whereas the more common ones seem to have minimal changes.

We discussed a prescribing budget and what that means for patients as well as explaining the role of our practice pharmacist.

Other Areas

• We discussed the changes towards a 7day working week and asked for thoughts on this.
• Patients said that currently they were happy with the way things work.
• The service would take a while to get up and running because there are not a large base of people that NEED appointments at the weekend.
• This would need to be promoted quite well before it becomes popular.
• We also discussed the possibility of cooperating with other practices to bring weekend clinics as this would give us a much larger amount of patients.

The walk in centre on the A6 has closed and we discussed that A&E has probably been the place that has suffered the most from this. Mastercall is still available but not having a walk in centre there makes things a bit harder for patients.

Flu and Shingle vaccinations was brought up and it was said that trying to understand all of the age ranges and criteria for these is quite confusing. Patients would like more information about vaccinations and we will try to put more info on our website.

Moving the Patient Participation Group Forward

When we last met in May we discussed that we wanted a proper group who would meet regularly to discuss issues but there was not a large amount of enthusiasm for this. Because of this we decided that we would keep going as we are and make available options to continue contacting us with suggestions or issues as and when they arise. We would then schedule these practice meetings as and when we thought we had enough to discuss with members of the practice.

We were probably going to look at a further meeting in Spring 2016.