Written evidence submitted by Sue Gallagher (FGP0018)

I am Sue Gallagher, former carer for my husband who had Parkinson’s and Vascular Dementia. Our journey to get help was convoluted, confusing and all landed back on me. After Bob died I decided to stay involved with different services to offer my experience and hopefully improve services and create more joined up thinking and action.

The future of General Practice.

Like all systems who are engaged in patient care, GP practices are a PART of that patient journey and experience.

Patients MUST know

• how to contact other services
• how their “journey” is proceeding
• who the clinicians and other personnel are and what their role is.
• What days their named GP is working. If we don’t know that he/she is part- time, we can find it frustrating to be told that a GP is not available on such and such a day, without knowing that they don’t actually work on that day!

GP services are PART of the PREVENTION agenda  along with colleagues in Community, Care Homes, Domiciliary Care, Social Services and Acute services

Communication with patients is crucial.

• An example -  when a current CCG letter appears with eg. Details of cholesterol testing, but says only that you are at ***% RISK, without saying what your actual level is, this is unhelpful. This may be broader policy, but GPs could influence the wording of letters to be more helpful to patients.
• Patients do understand that times have changed, even though some may hark back to their perception of the “good old days” and with the right communication you may find that there can be converts to new systems, and patients who had a great telephone call, or a great skype.  Give us time!
• Please communicate better about the range of professionals/clinicians who could be the best person to see.  For some patients, used to expecting to see ONLY the doctor, this may take time.

Patient Participation Groups are mandated in England, but don’t necessarily exist!  WHY?

• This may look like “extra work” for practice staff, but they are so important in helping to find out how the population views the service, and what the population understand about the services.
• They have the potential to be a trusted group of critical friends, and the potential to understand things from the clinicians/practice staff’s  point of view and therefore understand about having reasonable expectations, and about greater self care.

Telephone and Digital comms.

Do staff ever ROAD TEST the telephone systems or the telephone triage themselves, so that you can put yourselves in OUR shoes.

TRIAGE

• Your reception teams must be trained in understanding that a patient may not be able to say immediately and lucidly why they are telephoning.  It may have cost much courage.  We may need a bit of listening before we get to the point. So your reception teams MUST ABSOLUTELY NOT be pressured into rushing patients on. This will not result in a good outcome.
• Your reception teams give the FIRST IMPRESSION so it has to be good. Ensure they always introduce themselves and ask what name thewy should use to the caller.

ACKNOWLEDGE the POSITIVES.

Many patients HAVE accustomed themselves to new ways of contacting the practice and getting help and have seen the benefits eg:  the parent who said she was so glad she didn’t have to take her small daughter to the surgery and back when the problem was so well dealt with via a video call, or the patient who didn’t have to get a lift to the surgery and keep the chauffeur waiting and had a telephone/video call instead.

Nov 2021