In June, we celebrated Pride Month alongside Armed Forces Day, and we brought you lots of HUB updates, some new features in Holiday Manager, and much more.

Best of our blogs

Tackling health inequalities – The LGBTQ+ experience with GPs – By Ceri Chaplin – Pride Month is a time of celebration, reflection and advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community.  While June is a time to recognise the progress made towards equality and acceptance, it’s also crucial to highlight areas where more work is needed. One such area is healthcare and, specifically, the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals with their GP practice. Read more

HR Clinic – Managing Staff Consultations and Changes (Questions and Answers) – For most of us in practice, managing and leading change processes is a regular activity. This gets particularly challenging when changes impact staff roles, responsibilities, hours, work environment, or even contractual entitlements. In May’s HR Clinic, Robyn Clark (aka JacksonR) and Susi O’Brien (HR Help advisor) answered your questions on all aspects of managing change. Here is a summary of the questions we received, and the answers given. Read more

Do Practice Managers support the BMA’s GP collective action? – Now that the British Medical Association (BMA) has opened its ballot for collective action among General Practitioners (GPs) in England, in protest at the imposition of the latest GP contract, Practice Index has asked a number of Practice Managers how they feel about any upcoming action. Read more

The ‘summer holiday childcare shuffle’ – By Susi O’Brien – Can you believe it’s summer already? Scottish and Northern Irish schools are on the verge of breaking up, and English schools will do the same in a matter of weeks. What workplace rights do employees have to support them with holiday childcare? And equally, what are their responsibilities? Read more

Who’s next in line for succession and what’s your plan? – By Phil Coates – There are many roles within general practice and whilst some people will stay in the same job for their entire working life, others often decide they want to do something different and change their job every few years; this is now considered the norm. However, something that perhaps requires more attention than it receives is the criticality of succession planning. Read more

Popular new and updated resources [PLUS]

• Contract of employment – Term time employees paid for only part of the year (Scotland)
• Contract of employment – Term time employees paid in averaged instalments (Scotland)
• Shared decision making policy
• Friends and family test
• Confidential waste policy
• Performance management – Capability procedure
• Flu jabs poster for 2024
• The Ultimate Social Media Planner 2024 (July – December) [FREE]
• Freedom to speak up policy and procedure
• Removal of patients policy
• Summarising policy
• Cervical screening programme guidance document

Popular forum threads

• AI for clinical coding
• Reception staff numbers
• Inappropriate instant messaging
• Social media
• Is this insubordination…?
• GDPR and deducted patient demanding SAR Health Records
• What are you sick of hearing?
• Deputy v Administrator
• Annual leave for roles
• The battle of the parents…

New Practice Index Training courses

An Introduction to Integrated Neighbourhood Teams
Understanding the Tendering and Procurement Process

You can see a full list of training courses here.

Practice Index Learning Package

Updated:

• Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
• GP Practice Management Masterclass
• Receptionists in General Practice Masterclass

You can find out more information about our Learning Package here.

New features in the HUB

• Contacts – You can now delete a contact by changing the status to ‘Inactive’
• Checks – When managing an action, you can now pick ‘Not Applicable’ as an outcome
• Compliance Actions – Within a staff profile, in the ‘Compliance Actions’ tab, you will see a list of all the actions for that staff member. You can also apply a bulk action to the list of actions that will assign an additional staff member to the selected actions

Holiday Manager:

• Users can now request other types of ‘Absence’, for example, sickness and study leave
• Managers can now add notes to record the makeup of ‘Base Entitlement’, for example, includes 25 days annual leave, plus 2 days’ long service
• Users can now change the sort order on annual leave requests so they can see leave in request order
• Leave page now displays the date of authorisation to enable users to check recent changes
• ‘Other Leave’ report now displays notes

HUB support videos 

• A short overview of the Practice Index HUB
• An overview of the Library
• A staff member’s guide to Policy Manager
• A staff member’s guide to using the HR Package – A full overview
• A staff member’s guide to managing HR Alerts
• A quick overview of Policy Manager for PLUS members
• An overview of what’s included in the Practice Index Learning Package
• What’s included in the Learning Package – eLearning Mandatory and more
• What’s included in the Learning Package – Lunchtime Learning
• What’s included in the Learning Package – Facilitated Learning
• Learning Manager – A quick overview of Reports
• Learning Manager – A quick overview of ‘My Learning History’
• How to use the Learning Passport to transfer existing Practice Index learning records
• An overview of the On-Site Register

Help Centre – A compilation of FAQs, useful videos, and information on our HUB products

HUB weekly support sessions – Join one of our weekly sessions to discover more about the HUB and what it can offer.

Further updates can be found here.

If you’d like to know more about Practice Index PLUS and any products in the HUB, you can book a demo here.