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Does your surgery currently combine appointments for patients where appropriate? Have your staff been trained to ensure that chronic disease reviews and amber medication reviews occur at the same time wherever possible?

Combining appointments brings a lot of advantages

In our experience an 8,000 patient surgery can save around 1,500 nurse appointments a year.

As most medication reviews and chronic disease reviews usually involve checking the same physiological parameters and carrying out blood tests, it saves work load for the nurses. Nurses do not need to see the same patients over and over to carry out missed blood tests or missed observations.

Combining appointments also reduces workload for your back-office team and reduces costs for your surgery as it reduces the amount of administration the surgery needs to carry out.

A COPD patient on 24 hour oxygen, using CPAP at night will likely need more regular reviews than a COPD patient who has quit smoking and is using his salbutamol inhaler once a week.

Does your surgery have processes in place to continually assess which patients require more frequent monitoring? Does your surgery have processes in place so that this more frequent monitoring really takes place and that certain patients are not being missed?

Risk stratifying patients helps surgeries to identify high needs patients, it allows appropriate management plans to be put in place and reduces hospital admissions.

BookYourGP allows you to easily risk stratify your patients. It's not opinionated, so you can stratify your patients in the way you'd like.

If for example a patient has newly been started on a DOAC or another amber medication, how do you ensure that these patients have been correctly identified and are being followed up by your surgery?

If a patient has been newly diagnosed with Hypertension how do you ensure that they are being correctly followed up?

This is trickier than you initially may think! Current clinical reporting systems do not have an accurate way to identify patients with a new diagnosis or a newly commenced amber drug.

When these patients have been identified, your surgery then should also have a robust system in place to ensure that they are getting followed up properly.

BookYourGP can do the heavy lifting for you, so you can easily identify patients who are not being followed up for their amber medications and / or chronic diseases.

In our experience most surgeries put in a fair amount of effort to ensure that recalls are entered into the patient’s record.

However, this is heavily reliant on surgeries running reports regularly, there is no guarantee that the recall gets acted on in a timely manner (if at all) and if the patient does not attend (cancelled appointments, DNAs, if the patient has been hospitalised etc etc), then the recall does not get updated and the patient often goes missing to follow up.

The problem in our opinion is that complex care co-ordination is done in a manual ad-hoc process. This increases work load for surgeries and produces worse care for patients.

BookYourGP helps automate, organise and stay on top of important aspects of patient care.