Category: Discussion

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Date: Thursday 17 November 2011
Location: Victory Services Club, London
Event organised by: PCC (www.pcc.nhs.uk)
Cost: FREE

Summary:
GPnetworks has been offered 30 free places at the event (normal price £195), available to our practice members, on a first-come-first-served basis. Email admin@gpnetworks.co.uk if you wish to attend and we will send you a registration code that will allow free registration.

Event description:
With practice mergers increasing and increasing pressure on practices to think and behave collectively in the transition to CCGs, practice managers and partners need to be aware of the consequences of change. This event looks in detail at the benefits and pitfalls of working in partnership whether through merger or federation with other providers or less formal routes.

One session looks at the business considerations of practice mergers and splits, and the potential consequences of incorporation. What are the financial consequences for a high-performing practice of merging with an average achiever? What non-financial factors do practices need to consider before merging – eg population profile and performance against patient survey indicators? What are the risks if it goes wrong?

Other sessions look at:

• How to federate and the benefits of federation, including group purchasing
• Working with patient reference groups, particularly in light of the PP DES
• Working with community pharmacy to reduce costs and improve service deliverables
• A pilot scheme to increase choice and reduce the cost of online procurement designed with and aimed at practice managers

The event also covers real-life examples of federation, considering how the risks can be mitigated and the benefits optimised for the benefit of all stakeholders from purchasing to patient participation.

The new patient participation DES makes explicit the link between more effective patient representation and practice income, but the connection needs to be hard-wired to the strategy. If the needs of patients are not permanently aligned with business development plans, your aspirations to grow the business and better serve the local population could be compromised.

PCC event info and registration here

To register for free, contact admin@gpnetworks.co.uk for an event registration code

Delegates attending: GPs, practice managers, other practice staff and PCT primary care leads.

This discussion is a sibling to an earlier discussion about the development of a specific feature inside GPaccounts.

The ideas raised in that earlier discussion are:

• Allow a ‘switch’ within the GP Surgery screen to control if Practices can see a GPs availability outside their Work Radius (but do not show Practices how far a GP is from their location).

• Add an attribute to Practice accounts: Parking space available? [yes | no]

• Bring back the multiple session Requesting/booking feature for Practices (this was removed because it was under used)

• Re-order the Inbox to show non-confirmed items before confirmed items

• Send reminders to GPs for Confirmed sessions the day before the session

• Enriched doctor profiles – to include: GPs Ts&Cs, GPs interpretation of the 4 sessions and GP details of willingness to travel related to work details.

Please give us your thoughts and ideas below.. They will form the basis of the next release of the GPnetworks system.

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

The 14th National registrars and new practitioners study day

Wednesday 15 June 2011

Includes:

A presentation from Claire Gerada at the RCGP on the future of general practice

A presentation from David Pendleton on clinical leadership.

Workshops on topics including accident and emergencies in general practice, skills required for commissioning and dealing with complaints.

Download the official flyer below

  Registrars_day_flyer.pdf (483.2 KiB, 1,554 hits)