Appraisals are an essential part of your role, and are vital for the development of your team. The NHS constitution requires organisations to provide staff with clear roles and responsibilities, opportunities for personal development and line management, to support them to succeed.[1] Integral to this requirement is the need for appraisals or what some people may…

You don’t need to be told that the healthcare sector is facing a staffing crisis. Across most job roles, leavers are outnumbering joiners – and those that do remain seem to be struggling with morale. Staff morale is a hot topic – and a problem – for Practice Managers. On the one hand, given the…

As we’ve written about in detail before on the Practice Index Blog, few things cause practice managers more concerns than staffing – especially the cost of it. It’s no surprise either, given the size of a practice’s wage bill. A recent question posed on the Practice Index Forum brought the topic to the fore –…

For practice managers, one of the biggest headaches is staffing. Recruiting new staff, retaining existing people, managing salary (and pension) costs and generally ensuring a practice has the right balance of personnel is tough. Then there’s the CQC’s safe staffing agenda to worry about. According to the CQC, Safe, effective staffing is about “having enough…

In 2011 the compulsory retirement age of 65 was abolished in the UK, following the implementation of the Equality Act 2010. Age is listed as one of the ‘protected characteristics’ and it was deemed to be discriminatory to force a person to retire purely because they’d reached the age of 65. Nowadays employees can continue…

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,…

In the previous two blogs we’ve covered induction, handovers, terminology, collaborative working and working at scale. Now you’re settling into the role, you know your organisation, you know the team and you’ve got a good understanding of your role. But what about contracts? Do you know enough about contracts? Would you like to know more?…