Over the past year some of you will have received a questionnaire from the government via MORI. The questionnaire included questions about all sorts of things, from what you think about the building to how easy it is to secure an appointment with a Doctor.
Unfortunately some of you were disappointed with us and rated us poorly. As a result a significant amount of our funding has been withheld by the government.
We have been aware that some patients have struggled over the past 5-7 years while we have worked through a transition period resulting from all bar one of our original doctors retiring.
We now have an (almost 100%) new, settled and once again established team.
After an initial settling period during the latter part of 2009 we started to invest significant time and effort into staff training. The training has been predominately focussed around providing consistent and clear messages to our patients thereby ensuring our patients understand our appointment system and get access to what they need, when they need it.
Within the practice we have started to feel the benefit of this investment, and we have recently received letters from patients acknowledging an improvement. Unfortunately this improvement was too late for the 2009/10 patient satisfaction survey.
Moving forwards we would like to reassure you that we will strive to provide patients with continuity of care, in a high quality way. We therefore sincerely hope that all our patients start to feel an increased positivity towards the practice and believe that things genuinely are improving.
For those that are interested, all the results of the patient survey are published in detail on a special website.
The relevant links are as follows:
www.gp-patient.co.uk
www.gp-patient.co.uk/surveyresults/
http://www.gp-patient.co.uk/practiceinfo/
June 2010