Waterside Medical Centre – Southall
This practice was taken over in November 2008. From the commencement date the practice increased its opening hours, now exceeding the required hours for extended hours (or for contract specification purposes). From the outset we remained open throughout the day including Thursday afternoons which was welcomed by patients.
Patients now have access to Receptionists by telephone and in person to make appointments, request and collect prescriptions and results. At the same time we were able to offer two late evenings; Thursday and Friday until 8.00 pm. We have recently introduced a further evening on Wednesday until 8.30 pm and Saturday morning from 9.00 am until 12 noon. For the future we are hoping to expand our extended hours to cover Monday and Tuesday evenings and offer both GP and Nursing appointments. Reception is now open 8am-8pm Mon-Fri and 9-12 Saturday.
The Practice is now providing same day appointments as well as advance booking. We are currently reviewing the DNA rates and subject to these not increasing will extend advanced bookings for appointments. There is an overall increase in appointments from our team.
Patients are now re-registering as former issues are being resolved.
We have very quickly been able to extend our services and are now offering in-house ECGs, immunisations, chronic disease management and contraception advice and travel health clinics. We are currently working to provide; ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, spirometry, CVD screening and phlebotomy services as well as becoming a Yellow Fever Centre. We will also be applying for minor surgery provision on site. All our referrals now go through the CAS system. We now have in-house transcription in place for all letters.
We have embedded all NHSolutions policies and procedures and recruited new staff to include a Practice Manager and two full time Receptionist/Administrators who between them speak a number of languages; Somali, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Sengali, Tamal and Spanish along with an extra tier of management in the form of a Business Development Manager who is putting a system for review in place for clinical scoring and oversees all management aspects within the practice to ensure compliance.
We will be making an application to become a formal training practice. We have increased teaching of medical students on site.
Our bi-weekly Clinical Governance Meetings are now in place and the full clinical team attend these. We are reviewing all clinical protocols to ensure a high quality standard.
We will be applying for Department of Health funding to increase Training Provision by improving premises. If successful we could apply for an extension to the premises at the rear to increase the number of clinical rooms.
