Date for your diary… on the afternoon of Tuesday 17th June the practice (both Beaumont St and Elms Rd sites) will be closed for county wide training.  The practice will reopen as usual at 8am on Wednesday 18th June. 

Staff news…. with sadness we announce two of our nurses will be leaving us, one to retire and the other for a change in career.  Both Sarah Senior and Viv Davies will be greatly missed by staff and patients.  In happier news, a new Pharmacy Technician has joined the team to support the pharmacists in the practice.  When she has settled in, we will share a day in her life at the practice, to aid understanding of this role.

On 1st May the most recent PPG meeting was held at the Elms Rd site.  Amongst other things we discussed building works, staff changes and current the triage system.  We decided it might be helpful to share how the system works to avoid confusion….
Beaumont Elms Triage system
Triage is the process of prioritising patients to determine the order in which they need to be treated.
Each day, we receive around 4-500 calls and among these are an average of 120 requests for urgent appointments and around 120 requests for routine appointments. Our reception team are trained to triage but do not make clinical decisions.   
If the request is for a GP appointment the patient will be added to either the Duty Doctor list or the Routine Triage list.
Only urgent matters are added to the list for the duty doctors and these patients will receive a callback from a doctor on the same day. We cannot give a time for that call because the GPs on duty will work through the list in order and some medical matters will take longer to deal with than others. 
Calls added to the Routine Triage list will be reviewed by a clinician or senior member of staff. That person will decide on the best course of action for each patient and inform the reception team.  The reception team then contact the patient within 24-48 hours to either book an appointment, with clear instructions for next steps or with relevant self-help information. This will be by text or telephone.
The reasons for establishing our triage system include;

  • patient safety - to ensure that clinicians are caring for patients in order of need.
  • prevent reception staff feeling that they are responsible for making clinical decisions
  • To ensure that you are seen by the right person first time. Many of the urgent and non-urgent issues can be seen in minor illness sessions or by a nurse, pharmacist, paramedic, physiotherapists.  Some can also be seen by other organisations such as Minor Eye Conditions, Urgent Care Centre etc.

A day in the life of...... a medical receptionist
Some think that reception staff are gatekeepers who just answer the phone. That just isn’t true!  Although answering the phone is top of the list most days. When we ask the reason for your appointment request, we’re not being nosey, the clinicians ask us to get as much information as possible to help them decide about your care.
Normally we will be the first person you will see when arriving in the practice and the first person you talk to on the phone. We will ALWAYS try our best to help you. If we don’t know the answer, we ask colleagues and clinicians.  Sometimes it may take a little longer to find a solution.  There are times that we are just not able to help.  But we ALWAYS do our best.
Prescriptions are also processed by reception staff and sent to the GP for signing.  We receive A LOT of these every day.  We try our best to process them all quickly, but we also must wait for the GP to sign and they are often busy too.  If we query whether your prescription is due there is something in the system telling us that it isn’t!
We also register new patients. We have a lot of new patients so there is sometimes a wait for your registration to be processed.
We carry out a variety of other admin tasks; opening mail, writing letters, dealing with online requests, emails and e-consults.
Please remember… We work closely with the clinicians in everything we do, we do not make the rules but we follow them to make sure everyone is treated equally.  Most of all we are only human, so we do make mistakes.  These aren’t done on purpose, and we try to rectify them as soon as possible. It means we can be upset by patients who shout or are aggressive towards us. But when someone says ‘thank you’ we go home with a smile on our face.​​​​​​​