Preston Park Surgery News – April 2020

Preston Park Surgery’s Practice Manager Janak Chauhan has provided the following report on the current situation (April 2020) at the practice:

• We have had an additional 15 PPG members join and I have circulated the Virtual PPG group details to them and asked that they sign up.
• The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed us to look at different ways of engaging with our patients and has ensured we are able to make best use of the technology available.
• Our operational focus is around delivering continuous care to our patients during the COVID-19 pandemic whilst maintaining the health and safety of our colleagues.
• We hold a daily morning meeting with all the staff to discuss any issues and all the clinicians and myself have a daily lunchtime meeting to discuss our plans and actions. The key decisions are made at these daily meetings.
• Over the last month we have introduced telephone triage for all our appointments. Very simply the patient calls the surgery and they are put on a list for the GP to contact them. The GP calls them and decide the best course of action and if they need to be seen then they are invited for a Face to Face appointments with the GP or Nurse or Nurse Practitioner.
• We are also continuing to undertake our nursing appointments and ensuring our patients requiring nursing care are catered for.
• We still continuing to deliver child immunisations as this is very important.
• We have adopted the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) ways of working during the current crisis and as always the health and wellbeing of our patients is our number one priority.
• We have adopted Video Consultations and this is proving to be very popular and beneficial for our patients.
• We are about to introduce eConsult as another form of consultation for the patients. From our website the patient is able to complete a simple questionnaire of their symptoms and this is emailed to the surgery and forwarded to the GP to review and contact the patient.
• In terms of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) – we are fine as we started planning and increasing our stocks from mid-February as we felt the pandemic would worsen. We monitor our levels twice a week and top up accordingly. The key thing is that the cost of the PPE has risen astronomically.
• We have stringent cleaning measures in place and all staff are instructed to follow these measures rigorously. We are also following the 2m social distancing rule and all staff are reminded about this daily.