An Important Message to Our Patients

Safe Working Practice

The way we work at Binscombe is underpinned by two core values: the wish to deliver the best care we can to our patients, and the need to look after the wellbeing of our staff. These two values are mutually dependent on each other - staff need to feel safe and secure at work to deliver the best care.

With the increasing national pressures on General Practice, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain these two values at all times, and we have had to do some hard thinking about how to keep both our patients and our staff safe in the current environment. The demands on primary care have increased year on year, with more and more work being passed from hospitals to GPs, more emphasis on preventative medicine, which requires extensive monitoring, and increased medical complexity as the population in the UK ages. These pressures have not been matched by the funding required to meet these extra demands, and it has become increasingly common that the volume of patient-need on a particular day threatens to overwhelm our staff, potentially putting patients at risk if the clinicians are overworked.

Until now we have always accepted all patient requests that have come to us during our working hours, but, like most GPs, we have had to accept that this is not sustainable. Guidance on safe working practice for GPs now recommends that GPs should limit the number of patient contacts they attend to each day, so that they are able to see their patients safely, and without feeling overwhelmed or exhausted. Once a safe limit has been reached, the practice should signpost any urgent care needs to other providers of care. Sometimes this will be because another service is the most appropriate, such as the Pharmacy First scheme or the Minor Injuries Unit, or patients should be advised to call 111 if they need urgent advice.

What does this mean in practice for Binscombe?

We will continue to work hard to provide as much capacity as possible to care for our patients each day, but on days when all the clinicians have reached their safe working level, we will take the following actions:

·         The electronic medical request forms will be turned off until 7am the next day.

·         It will still be possible to complete an Admin Request form, but these are not dealt with in the same way as medical requests and so should not be used to request medical advice.

·         Patients will be able to telephone the practice as normal and will be able to request routine and non-urgent medical help.

·         Where patients telephone the practice and request help the same day, or are felt to need help the same day, they will be signposted to another service as appropriate. This may be to call 111, or a service such as Pharmacy First or the Minor Injuries Unit.

We appreciate that this is a big change for us and will sometimes bring challenges for our patients, but we have reached something of a tipping point and feel that these changes are vital to ensure both patient and staff safety. We are very grateful for your understanding and support.