Supporting people to play a greater role in their own health and care clearly has benefits for GP practices – not least because it frees up time – which is why the NHS detailed Self Care and Management as the ninth action in its Releasing Capacity in General Practice initiative. For practices, this idea is…

Talk of GP burnout is never far from the headlines. Talk of more than half of GPs looking to leave the profession, many citing problems with workload and burnout, dominate the media. Stats back up the fact that burnout is a big problem too. Incredibly, more than a thousand GPs sought professional help from the…

Developing the team: Physician Associate Success The idea of utilising physician associates to ease the chronic GP shortage has been floating around for a while now. It’s a topic we covered on the Practice Index blog in 2017 – you can find the article here – and there has been plenty of talk before and…

NHS England faced fresh calls last night to sack Capita from managing primary care services after the failure to send 48,000 letters related to cervical screening. Previous investigations had found a few dozen letters about screening that had gone astray – but yesterday a widespread problem with the screening programme was revealed. The letters were…

Booking a GP appointment for your mental health is difficult, takes too long and risks making your mental health worse, according to research by the mental health charity Mind and independent research charity Picker. The major new survey of more than 8,000 people trying to access GP services for their mental health revealed: One in…

By PM Polly That document that we have to write in a hurry. Once it’s done we spend a ‘bit’ of time refreshing it and we spend a ‘lot’ of time hoping that it’ll never need to leave the safety of the ‘business continuity’ file. How your BC plan?! In 2012 my previous practice flooded,…

Repeat prescriptions are an integral part of everyday life at GP practices. And it’s no wonder – a late 2017 report written by the University of Bradford’s Dr Duncan Petty has revealed that almost half of the population (43%) are reliant on repeat prescriptions, resulting in over 800 million items of repeat medicines being dispensed…