Practice Newsletter June 2023

Posted on:

Welcome to the June 2023 Practice Newsletter

Staffing Changes

We are delighted to announce that the following staff have joined the team here at Wycliffe medical practice in the last few months.

  • Suzanne Laws – Medical Secretary
  • Neil Sharpe – Coder
  • Jayne Blakey – Reception Team Leader
  • Melanie Nixon – Receptionist
  • Zoe Thompson – Receptionist
  • Ellis Burns – Receptionist
  • Kirsty Fisher – Receptionist
  • Dr Emily Ford – Salaried GP

Current Medical Staffing

Partners

  • Dr Graham Johnson
  • Dr Sumona Maity
  • Dr Christine Kendall
  • Dr Binta Shapiro

Salaried Doctors

  • Dr Callum Colquhoun
  • Dr Jonathan Bodley-Scott
  • Dr Cara Booth (currently on maternity leave until July 2023) – Dr Rekha Desor is currently doing her maternity locum
  • Dr Emily Ford

Advanced Nurse practitioners

We have two advanced nurse practitioners who see a range of conditions and they are both able to prescribe medication.

  • Krystal Hurley
  • Anna Blagg

ARRS staff – These are roles introduced by the government a couple of years ago to work as part of the primary care team.

  • Davinder Sandhu – pharmacist
  • Lucy Croucher – social prescriber
  • David Shephard – mental health practitioner

Khabeer Fatima – first contact physiotherapist. This person is a trained physio but the role here is more to diagnose patients with musculoskeletal problems rather than provide physiotherapy for known ongoing musculoskeletal problems.

GP Registrars

We currently have two GP registrars at the practice. These are fully qualified doctors who are doing their further training to become GPs.

  • Dr Mohammed Zeeshan
  • Dr Benjamin Gowers

Practice Manager

  • Katherine Churcher

Extended Access

In July 2023 the government imposed new contracts on general practice which means as part of a primary care network PCN (we are in a PCN with the Masharani practice, Countesthorpe health centre, Northfield medical practice in Blaby and Hazelmere Practice in Blaby) we have to open for additional hours each week in addition to the core Monday to Friday 8am -6.30pm.

Our part of the extended access means that we are seeing pre booked patients only on a Tuesday night between 6.30pm and 8pm and every fourth Saturday morning between 9am and 1.30pm. Please note that during these times the surgery is not open for anything other than seeing the pre booked patients and we are not open for emergencies. Patients requiring urgent medical help during these times should contact 111 or 999.

We have used these clinics to do the autumn and spring covid booster clinics and our plan going forwards is to use these clinics for long term condition monitoring.

We appreciate patient’s frustrations regarding appointment availability. In the four years between June 2019 and June 2023 we have increased the number of appointments available by 22% but demand is increasing at an even faster rate. We are hopeful of appointing a new seven session salaried doctor in August 2023 which will further increase the number of appointments we can offer.

We continue to experience patients verbally abusing reception staff. Please be aware that our new phone system records all conversations and if we receive reports of any abusive behaviour, we will be able to listen to these conversations and take appropriate action.

If patients have any concerns about the practice please contact Katherine Churcher, practice manager.

We are restarting our patient participation group – the first meeting will be held on Thursday 6th July 2023 at the surgery between 6.30 and 8pm. If there are any patients that would like to join, please let reception know and the practice manager will be in touch. We are particularly keen to have some younger patients on the group as we would like as broader representation as possible. The meetings will be approximately 2 monthly.

ACCURX- Text Messaging to Patients

We are trying to reduce the need for face to face follow up appointments mainly to try to maximise the number of appointments available for patients with new problems needing an appointment.

We have a system called Accurx which allows us to send text messages to patients with results etc and the system also allows us to send a link for the patient to reply to the person sending the message. We are also asking patients to submit home blood pressure readings using this system. We have over 2000 patients with hypertension, and we need to review their blood pressure on an annual basis at least so this is a significant undertaking. By using this system we free up a lot of administrative time averaging home BP readings, as this system averages results supplied automatically.