Could Twitter help your practice? Promoting important messages is quick and easy with Twitter. Prompts to students about meningitis vaccinations; information about bank holiday out-of-hours services; reminders to patients to book a flu jab – these are just a few examples to show how Twitter can be used to help your practice communicate effectively. Before…

Much has been made – both within the primary care sector and by the media – about general practice. Extended opening times, the changing practice workforce, levels of care… but what do patients, arguably the people that matter the most, think about general practice? Practice Index interviewed a trio of patients of different ages and…

A paper commissioned by NHS employees earlier this year said training non-medical staff to do the work of doctors could be a ‘rapid solution’ to the practice workforce crisis. On the face of it freeing up trained – and expensive – clinical staff to focus on the work that only they can do, while getting admin…

Once the dreaded communication arrives from the CQC informing you of your inspection date it can spark a number of sleepless nights. What can you do to prepare? How do you know what you’re doing is right? What will the inspectors be looking for? Prompted by a thread on the Practice Index Forum started by…

By Nicola Hayward  A million years ago, when I first started putting my thoughts down on paper, I wrote an article about all of the abbreviations we meet every single day which seem to be heightened in the NHS. See I’ve started already! It was actually a set of instructions I’d received that had set…

A topic that came up in conversation recently with a practice manager surrounded how GP practices can be responsive to the needs of its population. This is something that practices definitely need to keep an eye on, especially as it’s an area that CQC inspections focus on and given the population of the UK is…

In the past week, the CQC has published a further 81 reports on the quality of care provided by GP practices that have been inspected. Another two practices were found to be outstanding, 61 practices were rated good, nine require improvement and, worryingly, five received inadequate ratings. Outstanding performance Leading the way with an outstanding…