Generally, practice managers who work in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland need to give policies a little more tweaking to make them relevant to their practices. This is because the majority of the reference material that’s available, familiar and therefore used migrates the policy towards NHS England or the English regulator, the CQC.

As such, a ‘call to arms’ went out to PMs across all UK nations recently to enhance local expertise.  I’m pleased to announce that both Ian and Ryan from Scotland have joined us and have diligently been working on compiling Scottish policies. We’ve also welcomed Fiona to ‘Team Blue and White’, and she has now started bespoke Scottish training courses.

Over the past few months, many of you will have seen on PLUS that we’ve had a big push on policies that are specifically for Scottish practices, and there are now 50 of these. We began with the ones we felt should be available in every practice up and down the land. Hopefully, you’ll agree that we’ve already made great progress.

Some of the recent new additions include:

• Cleaning standards and schedule policy
• Communication policy
• Safeguarding policy
• Clinical guidance document – Sepsis
• Dealing with unreasonable, violent and abusive patients policy
• Access to medical records policy
• Modern slavery and human trafficking guidance
• Clinical supervision policy

There are many more…

Also, there have been several updates which have now been uploaded to PLUS. With regards to training, Fiona has already completed ‘Sepsis for Scotland’ and is now working on ‘IPC’ and other bespoke Scottish eLearning courses for the HUB. However, we do still need your help.

Here are Ryan’s thoughts on how Scottish PMs can be further supported:

‘The past few years have presented many challenges for Scottish PMs; the implementation of the GMS Contract has brought new staff, new routines and higher patient expectations. If that wasn’t enough, we continue to work through a pandemic which has forced many of us to change or ways of working, taking up our valuable time which we would otherwise use to serve our practices and, ultimately, our patients. 

‘Practice Index has enabled me to have the time to do what we do best: that is, to manage our practices, support our people and provide the best patient care possible. Whilst we benefit from being members of our excellent peer-to-peer local support networks already, PI can supplement this further. And, on a national level, PI provides training, support and has access to many new and updated Scottish-specific policies that can all be adapted to meet individual practice needs.”

If you have any additional thoughts, we’d love to hear from you. Please either DM me, pop it into the General Forum, or start a thread in the dedicated Scotland Forum and we’ll see what we can do.

While we do have a range of specific policies for Northern Ireland (here) and Wales (here and here), we would love to be extend our library of resources. If you feel you could help, drop me a line.

Furthermore, should you wish to know more about how Practice Index can help, please click here.