Matlock Road surgery local participation report - 2012
Description of the profile of the members of the ‘virtual’ patient representative group. (PRG).
48 patients were recruited to the PRG from our total practice population of 2853. This represents roughly 1.5% of the total number of patients.
Of those members, 48% are male and 52% are female, with no-one in the transgender category.
The majority of the PRG members describe their ethnic origin as white British. There are 2 Irish, 2 Chinese and 4 Other.
All members considered themselves heterosexual apart from 2 who did not want to disclose this information.
The religion or beliefs of the members were split as follows:
Christian 14, Agnostic 8, Spiritualist 1, no faith 11, Atheist 3, Jainism 1, Buddhist 1. 9 people did not answer or did not want to disclose the information.
9 members had at least one disability or long term condition.
4 members described themselves as carers.
It is difficult for us to obtain an accurate profile of the general population of this practice, as we have not been collecting certain information about our patients until quite recently. We, therefore, do not have reliable statistics as to the ethnic background, religion or sexual preference of our patients. (We are now collecting all this information).
We do know that we differ from the more central practices in Brighton regarding the population of our practice. The majority of our patients are white and at the older range of the age scale, with English as a main language. We also do not have a large amount of transient patients, as with some of the other practices. The majority of patients answering our survey were either employed (full-time or part-time) or retired.
We have a fairly even split of male and female patients, with 48% being male and 52% female.
Because we have a GP (Dr Chang) who speaks Cantonese, we do have a certain element of Chinese patients, most of whom have some difficulty in understanding more complicated English.
We also have within our area, a home for young adults with learning disabilities and several nursing homes.
We decided to have a ‘Virtual’ PRG and recruited, to begin with, from those patients coming into the practice. Once we had the nucleus of a group, we looked at it to see how we could make it more representative. This was done, firstly by approaching people directly in the surgery (eg. Targeting young people, people with ethnic backgrounds, including Chinese people and older people (75 years +)). We found that these particular groups seemed very unwilling to become part of a patient group and having discussed this with other surgeries, it seems a general trend.
We also wrote directly to some of our Chinese patients and to some of the young people at the learning disabilities home (in very simple language). From this we recruited 2 Chinese patients and 1 from the LD home.
The survey which we produced was devised from the areas which our patients had identified as being of interest to them. This was decided by providing our patients with a ‘tick list’ of what they would like us to ask about.
All the questions on our survey originated from this, although we also took into account some of the national patient survey issues.
The survey was designed with the help of the question template provided by the Primary Care Commissioning CIC. This was then published on the NHS website and we received 6 completed surveys from our Virtual PRG. We also wrote to patients who were interested but didn’t have an email address and those with an email address which wasn’t correct. We handed out surveys in the surgery over a period of 3-4 weeks.
Unfortunately, we had a lot of problems with the system which we tried to use to make contact with our patients and because of this, it has not been possible to obtain any feedback from our virtual group, apart from those we have been able to speak to. We have been assured that the emails sent are being received and a separate email address was also included in case patients preferred to email directly. We also suggested that they could come into the surgery if they didn’t want to complete the survey online. Some of the patients have told us that since being included on the system, they are receiving up to 20 NHS emails per day and can’t identify which ones are coming from the surgery, so are just deleting them all. One of our patients asked to leave the group because of this. All this has been reported. The results of the survey have been published online for the PRG and comments invited. As we only have a ‘virtual’ group at present, this has presented major difficulties with obtaining feedback.
There are two ways of trying to remedy this. One would be to invite the PRG members to a meeting where we could discuss the problems. The other would be to set up a completely different system and start again with feeding in the information. The surgery staff will be discussing the best way forward for us, the PRG and our patients.
The findings from the survey show that the majority of our patients are happy with the service which we provide. (See copy of report)
There are some suggestions which we could incorporate into an action plan when we have been able to involve our PRG in this.
One is to have a large notice in the waiting room, advising patients that they need to book in with the reception staff before sitting and waiting for an appointment. This would avoid problems when someone sits down unnoticed by the receptionist and was put forward by a patient who sometimes forgets to do this.
Another suggestion would be to have better ways of reminding patients that they should ring in the afternoons (when the telephone is not quite so busy) to obtain test results. This reminder could be incorporated on the appointments advice we give out and could also be flagged up in the waiting room and in the practice nurse’s room.
The opening hours of the practice are 8.30am – 6pm Monday to Friday and an enhanced hours evening surgery on a Wednesday from 6.30 - 7pm. The two partners in the surgery (Dr Chang and Dr Allan) provide this evening service alternately. From 1pm-2pm during weekdays and at all other times, out of hours GP services are provided by South East Health, the details of which are recorded on our telephone message.