We have been doing a lot of recruitment lately to fill vacancies in the team.
The aim of this was to release capacity in general practice by preventing surgeries having to cover multiple homes for visits, we hoped also to create a more sustainable working relationship between the home and the practice through the alignment.
This work started in the West locality last year and has moved to the East and onwards to the North and Washington. Progress has been patchy and slow in some places, this is against the backdrop of an increasing number of care home patients – the number has increased by 110 in the last 11 months. The original aim was to complete an alignment cycle across the city by the end of March 2017. The increasing number of patients, patchy progress and various other challenges within the localities means we won’t hit this deadline.
Given the potential further stretching of general practice resources by the increasing number of patients we have taken the decision to extend the deadline to create the alignment to the end of September 2017 this will have to be a hard deadline as we are using vanguard money to facilitate this alignment.
In terms of progress that has been made the West have now re-registered over 100 patients from their aligned care homes and 6 surgeries within the West are now more than 30% aligned with their local care home, with some of those surgeries more than 80% aligned.
Please remember this alignment is only implementable with patient consent which the home managers are tasked with recording. Also there is a £200 incentive for every new patient who you register from your aligned care home this is to cover the extra workload involved in performing the new patient check, reviewing the patient’s care plan and undertaking a medicines optimisation review.
If you have questions regarding your locality or surgery alignment please get in touch with Karen Swaile or Tracey Teasdale.