Now that our PCT funding has come to an end, we have started to charge Practices a small annual subscription. This is designed to keep us in business and time will tell whether this strategy works for us.
However, in order to survive, we also need to think about how to grow.
As you may already know, there are no technical or logical boundaries to the coverage of our service. We would very much like to try and expand this coverage further afield, beginning with the South.
We can do this by offering Practices outside our network free pilot accounts, so that they might evaluate whether or not we offer a useful tool for them. However, we need these pilot accounts to show plenty of GP sessional availability and often they simply do not.
A solution:
At this time, we allow GPs to fully manage which Practices can view they sessional availability, skills and contact details, from within the Surgeries tab of their account. This has meant that GPs are only contacted by practices that they have agreed to be contacted by.
In order for us to grow, we need to make a change to the way things work, so that your Surgeries list becomes a way for you to control which practices can see your contact details.
This way, any practice could see your sessional availability and could send you a Request but only via our system, whilst only those you specify in your Surgeries list would be able to see your email address and phone number and contact you directly. We would ensure that practices can see how far away from them you are before creating a Request to you but, what this change may amount to, is that you may occasionally get Requests via our system for sessional cover that is outside of your specified work radius.
From another perspective, however, it may make a big difference in our attempt to expand our coverage beyond its current limits. Which would, in turn, mean that GPnetworks may eventually become as useful to GPs in North London as it is to you.
This is by no means a planned change, scheduled to take place. It is something we would like to try and a request to you to back us in our attempt to grow.
We welcome your feedback below
The GPnetworks Team