Latest from the world of private GP

• At the top of this page you’ll find some curated news items
• Look for some practice insite in the ‘Useful Resources’ sections - links to the Private GP Forum (there’s a wealth of useful material there!)
• And our ‘Life of The Ground’ article is where you will find some editorial and opinion (and please note that it is just that, opinion - and we would welcome yours too!)

🚨 Private GP In The News

The Times - Patients Turn to Private GPs as Hundreds of Surgeries Close Down

Shares Magazine - Spire buy London Doctors Clinic to meet growing Demand

Useful Resources

View from a private GP: How should independent GPs communicate with NHS GPs?

🥼 Life On The Ground

HR, Compliance and Document checking – What you have to do, and why you shouldn’t do it!

Once a month there used to be a knock on my office door – a very particular kind of knock, one that I dreaded.

It was Josie our Practice Admin Team Manager, someone for whom I had an enormous amount of respect, and without whom, frankly, the practice could not have run – but this monthly meeting filled us both with fear and anxiety.

It appeared in my diary as ‘Staff Compliance, Documentation, Training & Chasing’.
For a grim couple of hours Josie and I would take it in turns to scroll down and across many columns (oh, how many columns!) of a byzantine excel spreadsheet containing the names of all the GPs, practice nurses, HCAs, receptionists, care navigators… Everyone who worked in the practice was there, had to be there, whether an hour a week or full time; clinical or administrative. And those columns? A log of every training module and course, document, DBS certificate, employment reference and dates done, dates due; reds, yellows, some greens if things were going well. And so much more.

The other half of the job was done by someone standing at a huge, 3-deck filing cabinet flicking, through staff records; pulling out files, checking against names and dates called out by the ‘Spreadsheet Starer’(tm).

I honestly don’t remember which of the two tasks was worse, but I do know we were each grateful whenever we swapped.

Once the call-and-response was done, or the paper cuts and eye strain just became too much, we’d move to ‘the staff chasing plan’ – identifying how and when we would nudge various staff who needed to book a training, update a document, provide something for us to photocopy (and whether we were actually allowed to keep certain documents, and who was actually allowed to read them when we did have them). Emails, meeting announcements, post-it notes and even name-and-shame events were all employed in the service of this Great Work and duly logged in great trailing note fields in the excel document.

And of course these checks, these documents, being on top of all these things- it really *is* important. It is important both in and of itself as a part of the quality and safety that is at the heart of our Practice, but also of course we need to be able to demonstrate this all to CQC! So, this work was onerous, complex, time-consuming, sometimes infuriating - but absolutely necessary.

And now? Now it is just easy. All of this, all this work, all the logging, the looking ahead, the nudging, the filing… all of it is managed by a digital platform (in our case Credentially) – with a series of easily created template roles for different staff, from the moment we make an offer of employment and add them to the system, everything from references to yearly appraisals to Enhanced Disclosure certificates, Practicing Privileges updates to exit interview documents is held and managed by Credentially. No more searching, no chasing, no possibility of missing things (no more paper cuts!)… my team are kept informed of everything, but the system also communicates directly with all our staff – messaging them ahead of time for every required item, sending them the right links and even giving them a tool to enable to quickly and easily upload documents using the camera on their phone in the app (our GPs absolutely *love* this feature, one called it ‘game changing’ to me recently).We can set priorities, alerts and checks – reminders where needed – and at any given time it takes a few seconds to have a truly complete picture of everyone working in the practice.

No more frantically focussed day of grim paperwork every month and then having to chase people for weeks after. And a huge side benefit – when CQC came to visit, no more heart-thumping missions to find thick, paper staff files, hoping the right things were all in the right place… we just gave the inspection team temporary logins with curated access to our Credentially platform…and they were able to answer every single question on training, staff compliance, HR, contracts – everything, in one place, through one interface. Needless to say that was better for them, and therefore better for us.

And Josie and I, we have a lunch meeting now, once a month – and I don’t dread that knock on the door at all.

(for more like this, go here!)