Recruiting new practice managers and keeping the good ones is a major problem for GP practices as the demands of the job continue to develop and change, and the attraction of better-paid jobs looms. I attribute my survival in the post from 1992 to 2010 to an ability to smile in adversity, a positive attitude,…

General practice continues to change and develop beyond all recognition as the 2019/20 GP Contract attempts to enforce the coming together of practices in Primary Care Networks with patient populations of between 30,000 and 60,000 – enough to support a ‘district hospital’. The choice to merge with others has been sparked by the difficulties in…

In the driving seat Having spent some time back in the driving seat recently in a busy practice, after a few years of being at home on the ranch, I realised that whilst the workload is changing all the time, I suspect that the employers’ attitude to their staff and their practice managers hasn’t changed…

“Audit is the process of critically and systematically assessing our own professional activities with a commitment to improving personal performance and ultimately the quality and/or cost-effectiveness of patient care” Although I’d normally avoid clinical audits like the plague, there are ways in which practice managers and their staff can help doctors carry out ‘administrative’ audits…

Being a practice manager, and possibly a new one, you need to get into the world of usernames, passwords, code numbers, portals and logins. You can do very little without a whole series of passwords; but the danger is that you’ll use a standard or obvious password and just once in a while change the…

One thread writer recently asked for help figuring out why three lots of records had been received for patients with the same family name, but with the same NHS number. My answer was to check the date of birth shown on all the documents. I recall one specific case where three male members of one…

The average patient list per doctor is said to be in the region of 1,800 patients. However, my experience of working in a registration department suggests that around 600 patients may have moved on, unknown to the practice, or be in the process of registering elsewhere. The NHS income from 600 patients is significant so…