Prioritising Patient Needs: Productive General Practice (PGP) Quick Start Programme.

• Patients received their blood tests on time. There are less delays and less complaints as variation across the practice has reduced, resulting in a more consistent service. As an example: Instead of some patients having to wait up to three months, the practice was able to provide the test within a month.

• The admin team freed up 13 hours per week dealing with blood related phone calls more efficiently/ This time has been used to support the nursing team set up additional blood clinics and deliver other patient facing services.
• Five hours of GP time were freed up, by using a new Standard Operating procedure which was used to create their own patient registers for recall.
• Running low on supplies when workload is high: The practice has developed a template (now in place) to be used in the future should they be short on supplies again.
• As a result of working on this project, the practice has commented on the great team working demonstrated across different departments and how it has strengthened the organisation.

Staff wanted to minimise any delays to the response time for blood tests

Catch up on the backlog

Free up time for the surgery

Develop a Standard Operating Procedure from a full national guidance issues on the shortage

SOP to be uploaded onto SystmOne with a flag to ensure all staff have read it.

Recall patients in order of priority

Additional blood clinics set up to ‘fast-track’ priority patients

Extending length of appointment times

“PGP Quick Start helps you sort through your issues quickly. It helped us reduce patient delays when there was a national shortage of blood phials and develop a template that we can use again if there are shortages in the future.” Charlotte Astin, GP, Sutton Benger Surgery

“You’ll be guided through the changes you want to make, and they’ll be broken down into achievable chunks. In primary care we lack time for design thinking and planning, but this programme will give you the space to do just that.” Emmy Butcher, Practice Manager, Sutton Benger Surgery

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