1. ADDINGTON ROAD RESPONSE TO PPGC SURVEY
RESPONSES TO SUGGESTIONS FROM THE PPGC SURVEY

2. Content Air Con for Rooms Water Dispenser in Waiting Room
Doctors are Excellent
Wheelchair Access in Rooms
Door Stoppers – Avoid Slamming Noise
Receptionists are Great
Very Supportive of Travellers
New Receptionists are Better than Older Ones
Credit Card Facilities
Mental Health Specialists
Awareness Weeks
Acupuncture
Blood Tests
Evening Appointments
Weekend Appointments
Hypnotherapy
Health Visitors
Baby Clinics
ECGs
Chiropody
Massage
Cholesterol Tests
Minor Surgery
More Screening
Complaints
Waiting Times
Issues with Repeat Prescriptions
Auto Check in
Rude Receptionists
Phone Lines are too Busy
Not as Good as Used to be
Communication within the Surgery is Bad
Doctors/Nurses not Consistently Good
Access to Appointments/Named GP

3. Water Dispenser in Waiting Room
AIR CON FOR ROOMS
The cost of central air conditioning is too prohibitive for us to contemplate, however, we hope to look into the costing for single units for each of the rooms.
Water Dispenser in Waiting Room
We will look into this as it is possible but need to look into appropriate location for Health and Safety (considering young children). PPGC could offer suggestions on preferred location.
Doctors are Excellent
We appreciated the vote of confidence and hope to continue to strive for excellence in all aspects of our service.
Wheelchair access in rooms
The building was purpose built and approved for disability. We would be glad for more information regarding this feedback.

4. Door stoppers – avoid slamming noise
The doors are fire doors and need to shut quickly in case of a fire. However, we will be putting up notices to remind patients not to let the door slam.
‘PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW THE DOOR TO SLAM SHUT,
KINDLY CONTROL THE CLOSURE IN CONSIDERATION FOR OTHERS’
RECEPTIONISTS ARE GREAT
We are grateful for and encouraged by this feedback. We will continue to strive to provide the best service for our patients
Very supportive of travellers
It is encouraging to know that our efforts to care for one of the recognised vulnerable groups have been recognised and will encourage us to continuously review our service delivery to meet the needs of other vulnerable groups.

5. New receptionist’s are better than older ones
This should generate an interesting discussion in our reception meeting. We have our ideas and it would be beneficial if one or two PPG members could participate in the discussion..
We don’t see how this is a realistic option open to us given the low volume of self-funding private work that we do.
Credit Card facilities
Mental Health specialists
Mental health service has historically been, and currently is contracted out by the NHS commissioning bodies such as the PCT, now CCG. We recognise the value of having an in-house counsellor, but we are not in a position to fund this ourselves given the parlous state of the NHS GP funding. .

6. AWARENESS WEEKS ACUPUNCTURE Blood Tests
This is in tune with the ‘evangelising voice’ of Dr Sodipe trying to convert some PPG members to embrace the propagation of health and awareness, so we are ready and willing!
ACUPUNCTURE
There has been only a limited commissioning of this by the CCG. The PPG may wish to take this up with the CCG.
Blood Tests
We are one of a limited number of practices that offer phlebotomy services. It is not feasible to have an all day phlebotomy service. Our appointment system is appreciated by most patients as they don’t have to go and wait endlessly in hospital.………..

7. Evening appointments Weekend appointments
We offer evening out of hour appointments compliant with our contract with the CCG. We should point out that quite a number of practices have withdrawn from providing this service. In an effort to improving ‘in and out of hour access to GP service, the Cameron government encouraged the formation of GP Alliance. We are paid up members of the Bromley GP Alliance and have access to these appointments. Interestingly, the GP CQC assessor observed that our patient uptake is way below expectation and advised that we should educate our patients on this valuable service We would appreciate discussion on how to undertake this in the full PPG meeting setting.
Weekend appointments
We offer weekend appointments at the Bromley GP Alliance surgeries. We are fully participating members, however the uptake from our patients has been below expectation as previously stated. We need to think of how to improve the uptake, to reduce pressure on A&E and UCC. The PPGC could assist us in promoting the option of Hub GP Alliance appointments.

8. HYPNOTHERAPY Health visitors Baby Clinics ECGs
This is commissioned by the CCG.
Health visitors
They were withdrawn from practices with little or no discussion with the commissioners before they did so.. The PPGC are welcome to pursue this with the CCG.
Baby Clinics
Used to be run in our practice by the Health visitors (H/V) with one of our partners in a tandem clinic to see babies that were of concern to the H/V until the service was withdrawn. We however, still undertake the 8 week baby development clinic.
ECGs
We are one of the practices selected by the CCG to provide this service to our patients, but disappointed that we were not chosen to provide the 24hr ECG & BP monitoring service.

9. Chiropody MASSAGE Cholesterol Tests
This is a limited service commissioned by the CCG, however our elderly patients can use the Age service which attracts a fee (Age UK). The PPG are welcome to take this issue up with the CCG if the they think it is worth pursuing.
MASSAGE
Massage as we know it is only provided privately by masseurs. As far as we know, there is no medical evidence to support having massage parlours in the NHS GP service.
Cholesterol Tests
These are offered to patients that qualify for NHS Health Checks (ages 40 – 74) and when necessary for other identified patients.

10. Minor surgery MORE SCREENING
We perform minor surgery within the remit of the contract with the CCG. We offer this service to both our patients and patients referred from other practices. Patients can only be offered this after consultation with a doctor has assessed that the lesion or condition meets the CCG stipulated criteria. However if the doctor is uncertain, he/she is expected to refer the patient to the minor surgery doctor who has the last say. As it is not a self referral service the promotion of this service has been restricted to our Patients’ information booklet and the website.
We strongly believe in the different NHS health screening programme- NHS health checks, breast & bowel cancer and retinal screening. We were recently named top 3 for chlamydia screening. To improve screening uptake, we add major alerts to the screen of non-responders to remind us to explore with them, the reason for the failure to uptake the screening and educate them as to the benefits of the screening. We do not understand the request for more screening as the population screening programmes are devised from above, using available evidence of the effectiveness and need.
MORE SCREENING

11. ISSUES WITH REPEAT PRESCRIPTIONS
WAITING TIMES
We will be carrying out an audit to access the magnitude of this problem in order to reflect on how we can rectify the problem. We should also point out that our clinicians strive hard to accommodate, in most cases, more than one issue and the official 10 minute allocation is for one problem.
ISSUES WITH REPEAT PRESCRIPTIONS
We are looking into the current process and will be having an audit to monitor this process and see where we can make an improvement. However, we are now doing repeat dispensing which we believe is safer as the repeat is monitored by the pharmacist who checks to see there is no side effect and the usage is appropriate. We are also setting up a prescribing which patients will be advised to use for all prescribing queries, in addition to encourage more people to sign up to on line access and making their repeat requests that way. These measures should also contribute to easing the pressure on the phone system.
AUTO CHECK IN
We have obtained an updated version of the the self check in system. This should resolve the issue of frequent break downs and allow a wider information gathering.

12. PHONE LINES ARE TOO BUSY
Rude Receptionists
We recognise that the receptionists are the first face of the practice and a high degree of customer service skill is needed to attend to people who may be anxious and in a vulnerable state. Hence, we have made customer service training mandatory for all receptionists.
We are hoping for a developmental, non-judgemental feedback from the PPG representatives at the next Practice Meeting when we hope, the PPG survey will be discussed.
PHONE LINES ARE TOO BUSY
We recognise this and are hoping Mr Yonge will be able to find an answer. We believe we have enough lines, (15 in total) coming into the surgery, hence there are more lines than staff to answer the calls. However we should point out that we do not have the physical capacity (work stations) to man all the lines even if we employed more receptionists. Reception have been asked to call for help when they’re struggling. We believe our push to encourage more patients to register for on-line services, should help alleviate this problem to some extent..
NOT AS GOOD AS USED TO BE
We require specific feedback on this, to give a meaningful reflection on it.

13. COMMUNICATION WITHIN THE SURGERY IS BAD, TEXT MESSAGE SERVICE
We have several internal ways of communication amongst the staff, such as, patient notes, admin notes and internal . But we do recognise we should continue to strive to improve in all aspects of our service. With regards to communication with patients, we use text messaging to inform patients of Flu clinics and child immunisations, there have been slight errors in the past, but as this is still fairly new to the surgery, it is a working progress and we hope to improve. We are also looking into a new screen in reception which will show up to date information on what the surgery has to offer.
DOCTORS/NURSES NOT CONSISTENTLY GOOD
As we role out staff appraisals, we will be doing a 360 feedback on each team member which will be discussed with them individually and concerns from the PPGC survey will be addressed with the staff.
ACCESS TO APPOINTMENTS/NAMED GP
We were aware of this from the IPSI Mori survey and are working on improvements. We again reiterated the need for continuity of care in our latest clinical meeting and encouraged clinicians to use the assigned review appointments appropriately. We hope now that all the GP’s normal appointments are on line, there will be an improvement in this problem.

14. We would like to thank the PPGC members for coming up with the idea of this survey, especially the volunteers that actually took the time to make it happen. Thank you very much…