A huge thank you to our West Street Surgery Patient Participation Group (PPG) for carrying out a Patient Experience Survey. We had a good response rate of 16%.
Rather than provide responses to every question, we have picked the ones that we think may be of greatest interest to our patients. As a practice we will be reviewing all of the data and strive to further improve. We hope that next year results will reflect changes that we make this year. What’s even better is that these responses are better that the national GP patient survey results from last year.
Q: How would you describe your overall satisfaction with the quality of service you have received from recent visits?
West Street Surgery is pleased to hear that 24.3% of respondents replied that the service received from their most recent visit had been excellent with a total of 91.3% of respondents stating that the quality of the service received from a recent visit was Excellent – Acceptable. We are disappointment to hear that patients have had a negative experience but can only action if we hear about it.
Q: How would you describe your overall Satisfaction with the practice opening hours?
17.9% of respondents stated that our opening hours were excellent with 74% replying excellent – good. West Street Surgery is contracted to be open 8am – 6:30pm Monday – Friday. In addition we offer extended access appointments to 8pm on Monday evenings and we are open on a Saturday once a month for pre-bookable appointments only.
Last year we offered we offered 65,763 appointments an increase of 5.5% on 2021. This year it will be significantly higher. Just in the past four weeks we have offered 6612 appointments which is over 1650 appointments a week.
This main focus for GP practices up and down the country is increasing patient access. Together with the other PCN member practices will be delivering a number of additional services from the hub including a minor illness clinic, which will be by appointment only (Monday – Friday) to be launched in July and hopefully a spirometry and ear syringing clinic later this year.
Q: How would you rate your ease of getting through to the practice by telephone now?
65.5% of respondents rated the telephone system excellent – acceptable. This has been our biggest area of improvement. Our ‘Surgery Connect‘ telephone system has been a great investment!
Let’s take a look at May 2023, we received 9911 telephone calls during the month, that is close to 500 calls a day with our busiest times at 8am and midday.
Our upgraded telephone system has certainly been well received and the call back function has made a big difference, however with over 50 patients all calling in at same time as soon as we open at 8am, I hope you can appreciate why it is just impossible to eliminate call waiting times, particularly first thing in the morning.
West Street Surgery has a multi-skilled workforce which means we can scale up or down depending on need. All admin and reception team staff are actively processing calls during our busy times.
Q: How satisfied are you with the task of booking appointments on the day with any GP?
It is always difficult, as soon as it hits 8am, patients are calling for appointments and that continues throughout the day. Its no surprise that appointment slots are taken quickly. That being said 58.9% responded that the booking of appointments on the day was excellent – acceptable.
Our new Acute Minor Illness PCN Service should be operational by the beginning of July. This will increase the number of on the day minor illness appointments and hopefully free up some of our GP appointments for more urgent cases.
Q: How satisfied are you with the task of booking appointments up to 2 weeks in advance with any GP?
As part of the new NHSE initiative on increasing patient access, GP appointments can only be booked up to 2 weeks in advance. It doesn’t stop patients being given appointments on the day if they need to be seen urgently, it just prevents us from offering routine appointments beyond two weeks. The main aim is to prevent DNAs (no shows) of which we still get several everyday. Some of our patients may not be happy with this change, but unfortunately its part of our new contract and our hands are tied.
Perhaps time to give a gentle reminder to cancel appointments if you are unable to attend. It’s even more simple now that we have an answer phone system, you can just leave a message, an idea that was suggested by one of our patients last year and implemented immediately.
Thank you once again West Street Surgery PPG.