The PPG has the following aim as decided by its members:

"To work closely with the surgery team, representing the views of patients, to develop the workings of the surgery and improve the health of the community".

• Promote the proactive engagement of patients.
• Seek views from patients as appropriate.
• Involve patients in decisions about the range and quality of services provided.
• Involve patients in decisions that lead to changes to the services the practice provides.
• Assist in gathering views from the wider patient population with local practice surveys.

Ground Rules

Ground rules are important to ensure people can participate fully and fairly at meetings. Members should: 

• Be encouraged and supported to share their experiences/ views of services. 
• Respect the views of others.
• Allow others time to speak. 
• Respect confidentiality: issues, comments, views should not be discussed outside the meeting, unless members agree that they can be shared or minuted. 
• Not use the meeting to air patient confidential complaints or grievances.
• Mute microphone at online meetings and use the ‘raise hand’ option to indicate they wish to speak. Be considerate of members who are not as IT literate as others.

This group helps us identify areas where we can improve or change, help us set goals and produce positive results. We would like to be able to find out the opinions of as many patients as possible, whether from meetings or an electronic forum.

We will keep you updated on surgery news and forward surgery newsletters.  We will meet 3 to 4 times a year.  We believe that by working together, this will help ensure the delivery of a modern, high quality general practice.

Latest PPG Meeting Minutes

Attendees

Present: Sandra Maddison (Practice Business Manager), Leanne Birch (Operations Manager), Dr Marie Goddard (GP Partner), Tracey Scorer (PPG Co-ordinator) & 29 PPG Members

Chair:  John Hewitt – PPG Chair

(Current PPG Membership 354)

1. Welcome

John welcomed everyone to the meeting, reminded the group of the PPG Mission statement discussed and agreed at the last meeting and reminded everyone that their views are important as the PPG are the ‘patient voice’.

2. Updates and Actions from the previous meeting

John Hewitt elected as PPG chair Leslie Senior – Vice Chair Website review – PPG generally very happy with the website, stating well laid out and lots of information. Some typos were pointed out, and some suggestions for better wording on the PPG page and the prescriptions page which have been amended.

3. Practice Updates

Leanne

Leanne said she is now the Operations Manager for the 3 surgeries that make up WBMP. She works at each of the sites depending on where she is needed on a day-to-day basis. Leanne went on to discuss some questions from the PPG.

Many projects underway to bring the 3 surgeries processes and protocols in line with each other and to work as efficiently as possible.

• Telephone answering and signposting
• Referral Management and Medical reports
• Long Term Condition patient management
• Prescription processing

4. BMA Industrial action and capping of appointments

Leanne said the British Medical Association (BMA) had advised GPs to limit their working day to a maximum of 25 patient contacts to achieve safe working for GPs. (This does not include other work such as processing pathology results, prescriptions, correspondence, triaging home visits and more, so they have not capped all the work). This puts more pressure on people getting appointments and puts receptionists in the forefront dealing with patients. There are posters up and leaflets available for patients detailing why the GPS have capped their appointments.

By introducing the BMA’s Safe working the number of offered appointments each day will fall. This means some patients with non-urgent problems may have to wait longer, but the priority is to ensure those patients that are seen receive safe care within the GPs limited capacity to provide this. There will be times when patients will need to be directed to more appropriate alternative services than are available at the practice.

Current waiting times for GPs vary from GP to GP but can be 3 – 5 weeks. The reception team are using their signposting techniques to offer appointments with other healthcare professionals within the locality, such as (GP and Nurse, Same Day access clinic for chest infections, sort throats, new breast lumps, tele dermatology, eConsult, Pharmacy, MIU, 111, Dentist, Social Prescriber (Help and Care), Care Co-ordinator, First Contact Physiotherapy, Mental Health Workers, Citizens Advice, Social Services, LiveWell Dorset, 119 for COVID queries, Practice Secretary, Practice Medical Reports Team.

Leanne advised the PPG to visit Safe working in general practice toolkit for further information.

The PPG mentioned if the surgery is directing patients to the pharmacists, who is keeping an eye on the pharmacist’s workload and the availability of seeing a pharmacist? Leanne said there is a Primary Care Network Pharmacy team who liaise regularly with the pharmacies and have assured the local practices that these are commissioned services by the pharmacies. If any PPG member does experience any problems, please let the Practice know.

5. Social Prescribers – are they being used?

The reception team are aware of what a social Prescriber is but do not signpost many patients. Referrals to Social Prescribers usually come because of an MDT meeting or via a GP. Often the receptionist deals with the presenting clinical problem and isn’t necessarily aware of other social needs.

Hilary who works for Age UK said that the Independent Living Service for Weymouth receives a good 60% or more referrals through the social prescribers. In Weymouth, they do a brilliant job and the care coordinators as well. So, people are seeing them and being referred on to other services as appropriate. John asked if the Social Prescriber information was on the Practice website and if not, could it be added?

6. Can staff state their name when answering the phones.

Leanne said she needed to discuss this with her management colleagues and reception team, Leanne agreed that she thought it was a good idea but she needed to consider staff feelings, and that some staff might not be so keen if patients are not being so nice to them, for example a patient might get frustrated with a receptionist and demand their name to make a complaint about them. The receptionist might then take this personally.

Sandra added that sometimes staff can be involved in challenging conversations, particularly if they have been asked for changes to be implemented. Sandra reassured the PPG that all staff are given help, support and training to deal with any difficult conversations and reassured the PPG that the vast majority of patients are absolutely lovely to deal with.

7. Information sent to patients

It was mentioned that some people from a local group had discussed difficulty viewing information sent via email in PDF format and asked if information could also be sent in Word? Tracey said she thought it more the other way around, that people had difficulty viewing items in Word, and that sending by PDF is the most common format, but she will look to sending information via PDF and word in the future.

Jim mentioned it might be that some people have older laptops or smart phones and that the Digital Champions at the library might be able to help and guide them in terms of the best way to view documents, or put something in the phone or machine, ie a PDF reader that could help.

8. Hospital Waiting Lists

A PPG member asked if there was anything proactive patients could do about this? Some patients are waiting longer and longer for appointments that are meant to be ‘urgent’ and using stronger drugs at home to cope. It wasn’t fair to keep going back to the GP expecting them to help.

A PPG Member mentioned speaking to Patient Liaison Services (Pals) at the hospital. Dr Goddard suggested emailing Lloyd Hatton MP – lloyd.hatton.mp@parliament.uk

Hilary Foggo (Age UK) said she was also happy for anyone to email her direct if there was anything she could help with. hfoggo@ageuknswd.org.uk

9. Do men have to have a physical examination before a PSA blood test can be taken.

Dr Goddard confirmed that men do not need to have a physical examination before a PSA blood test can be taken, however if a patient asks a phlebotomist to add on a PSA test when having bloods taken the phlebotomist will request the patient books an appointment with their GP to discuss this first. A PSA blood test is not a screening blood test. PSA can be raised for lots of other reasons, and it can sometimes, be low and normal with a patient with prostate cancer. Therefore, patients need to be made aware of this before deciding to go ahead with a PSA test

There is further information on the Practice website.

10. When and how were patients informed they could no longer request prescriptions by e-mail.

Leanne said as a merge practice of 3 sites they had to look to align more processes and protocols including prescriptions. Prescriptions requests are not taken over the phone or via patient email as this can be open to errors. For 1 month prior to stopping patients emailing requests, a reply was sent stating that the email account would be closing, that we would no longer accept requests via email, and stated the other ways that a prescription could be requested, either by patient online services, NHS App, Pharmacy, or in writing. Leanne also said that if patients were able to email requests, then they should also be able to use online services such as the NHS App to request prescriptions, which is quicker for patients to use and for the surgery to process.

It was also pointed out that Digital Champions are available at the library to help patients set up their NHS App on Online Services account. Tel: Digital Hotline on 01305 221048

11. Can the Practice send a message to patients who regularly do not attend (DNA) appointments?

Leanne said the reason we haven’t done this is there may be various reasons why a patient could not attend their appointment, gone to hospital, had a bereavement, an accident for example and the practice sending a message saying they did not turn up may not be the right thing to do.

Sandra said it would be useful to understand what the Practice DNA rate is, and compare this to other Practices, we could then see if there is any work needed to do around this. Jim said he could provide some data on the local practices, and we could discuss this further at the next meeting.

12. Long Term Conditions (LTC)

Sandra thanked the PPG members for recently completing a LTC questionnaire and defined LTC’s as ‘A health problem that requires ongoing management over a period of years or potentially decades, not something that there is an immediate cure for, and that is usually controlled through the use of medication and or other therapies’

So, when we talk about LTC’s we are talking about the more common ones like diabetes, asthma, heart disease, COPD, hypertension. The Practice is currently looking at attendance for LTC clinics, and how we can make every appointment count and also to enable patients to have the knowledge and the empowerment to be able to support themselves and to control their condition as much as they can. We have looked at all of our processes and the patient journey from diagnosis through to the annual review process and reminders for care plans.

We have now refined the LTC questionnaire with the help of the PPG feedback and we will start to send this out soon to some Asthma patients, followed by the other conditions so we can understand more on what areas we might need to prioritise and focus on. We have just over 27,000 patients registered at the Practice and 13,000 have a LTC. So, at some time during the year, these 13,000 patients will need an interaction with the practice or more often if needed.

13. NHS 10-year Plan Workshop update

John said he was very impressed with the feedback he received from the PPG of which he passed on to the workshop he attended, which was quite intense. Many people were talking about community hospitals., and the need for more community hospitals to really reduce bed blocking.

To bring back IT Champions Digital champions to help people with technology, so it's more local and you don't have some wait to go to the library. A lot of praise was given to the GPs in terms of wishing there to be more funding for GPS, so switching some of the funding away from hospitals more to GPs. They talked about social care and mental health, and to give more priority to mental health.

14. Healthy Happy Newsletter

John mentioned he had been working with the PCN on producing a newsletter of which the first edition was shared with the PPG. This will be added to the Register magazine March edition. It was then discussed how else the newsletter would be distributed. John is waiting to hear back from the PCN.

At 2.30pm John thanked all members for attending and brought the meeting to a close.

The date for the next PPG Meeting will be a Face-to-Face meeting held at Preston Road Surgery on Saturday 7th June from 1.30pm

Acronyms

• BMA – British Medical Association
• PALs – Patient Liaison Service
• PCN – Primary Care Network
• PSA – Prostate-specific antigen
• LTC – Long Term Condition
• PDF – Portable Document Format