Reply from The Nelson Medical Practice
Fri, 06 Sep 2019 15:47:45 +0100

We are very sorry that you are disappointed with the level of services that we offer here at The Nelson Medical Practice. It may be helpful if we can explain how some of our systems that we operate here. We do have appointments available more than 2 week ahead, but we reserve these to be booked by our clinicians when they need to see a patient for a follow up or ongoing condition. This helps to ensure that those patients who need continuity of care and follow up are able to access it. Care coordinators are experienced members of the GP/Clinical support team who handle the clinician’s administrative work. This frees up the doctors and nurses to use their time consulting either face to face or by telephone. Effectively they are the doctor’s personal assistants. The transfer of medical records is a function that is out of our hands. NHSE outsourced this function to a company called Capita some years ago. This contract has caused all GP practices significant difficulties, including the archiving of thousands of patents paper records rather than them being sent to practices. This being said most patient’s medical records are now transfered electronically. Although reasonably reliable this system is not completely fool proof. If and when an electronic record is not received we always, once we are aware of the problem, call the patient’s previous practice and request a printout copy of the record to be sent to us. We have no control over what is sent either by the electronic system or in hard copy. If we are made aware of missing information we will always contact a patient’s previous surgery to ask for a copy of their notes to be sent to us. From time to time we do employ locum GPs to cover absences for annual leave, sickness or recruitment “gaps”. We draw our locums from a select managed pool of experienced doctors. The vast majority of the doctors working here are, by a very large margin, either employed as salaried GPs or are partners in the practice. The last point that we need to highlight is that our same day call back team is staffed in the most part by GPs with a small number of other experienced clinicians supporting them. These include our Physicians Associate and our Advanced Nurse Practitioner. If our reception team (Patient Care Navigators) are not able to book an appointment for a patient, they will always offer a call back from this team who will then undertake a telephone triage and, if required, arrange for a patient to be seen face to face. Again we are sorry that your experience at The Nelson Medical Practice has not met your expectations. Without knowing who you are it is difficult to deal with the issues that you are having. This means that we can only respond in general terms. We would like to encourage you to get in touch with us directly in order that we can resolve the issues that you have been encountering. Vincent Poncia ( partner)