September 2005
Attending
Richard, Josephine, Anne and Tracey
The first forum took place on Tuesday 27th September. Unfortunately of the 12 people invited only 3 turned up. Two patients sent their apologises and one patient informed us prior to the meeting that he did not wish to take part.
We discussed
Access and the Telephone System.
Access
The three patients attended, were very positive in their outlook of the
practice. All stated that they did not have nor had had a problem with
access to see a Doctor, both ladies were happy to see any doctor when
they urgently needed to be seen, but did prefer to see a preferred doctor
during an episode of care and they found this could be done with planning.
One patient stated he had never required this service but had never had
a problem being seen by a doctor.
An issue that was raised however was the difficulty of seeing a Practice Nurse. Both ladies had incurred problems when trying to get an appointment outside the chronic disease clinics and one patients had had problems seeing Donna as her diabetic nurse. We agreed that this is something the practice would look at.
Telephone System
On discussing the telephone system two problems for patients came to light.
1. Phone engaged
2. Phone ringing but not answered
We discussed why the phones would be engaged, the major reasons for this being that patients phoned the practice inappropriately at busy times for blood results and non urgent appointments and that when we had less appointments to offer it would take the receptionists longer to find appointments which meant that calls took longer to deal with.
We also discussed the problems of the phones not being answered as quickly as patients would wish and they were informed of our limited staff resources and if the fact that on occasions if we were short staffed this could lead to a problem of having all the phones manned at one time constantly.
They raised the idea of having a call recorder at the front of the telephone system telling patients that they were in a queue so all calls were answered and the patients waiting had a idea about how long the could be waiting i.e. third in line. They did not want however the options of choosing different lines for different requests i.e. press 1 for prescriptions, they felt this would alienate old people and just annoy everyone else.
They also suggested putting up posters around the surgery telling people when to and not to phone regarding results and the making of non urgent appointments. They also suggested that we get a television put in the waiting rooms informing patients of this as well as telling them what services we had.
A patient also raised the suggestion of booking appointments by email and wondered if this was something we would be prepared to offer in the future.
A patient sited problems with Choose and Book and we agreed to discuss this at our next forum along with the patient survey. All three were happy to partake in this forum again and it was agreed to be held in the last week of November.