Patient Participation Group

Attendees

YP, NK, NL, DR, AM, SW, JD, GA, CT, DS

Staff updates

Since the last meeting the following doctors have left the practice; Dr Uduku, Dr El-Khouly and Dr Taha. The surgery thanked them for their service.

The trainees that always finish in August have rotated again which means we have said farewell to: Dr Young, Dr Nithya and Dr Baida

Nicole explained that we e have welcomed some new team members since the last meeting.

• 2 new salaried GPs; Dr Khaled Kataria and Dr Thomas Moghaddas 
• We have had a return from maternity leave: Dr Tanya Ansari
• Our new GP Trainees are Dr Catrin Jones, Dr Charlotte Burdett and Dr Hailey Laurayne 
• We also have a new HCA: Ann Austin and a new Pharmacist: Aiman

Yogesh, Pharmacist

Our practice pharmacist, Yogesh Patel attending the meeting to discuss proposed changes regarding pharmacy ordering of prescriptions. He explained that this was related to the work the NHS as a whole was trying to do to minimise medication wastage.

The current process allows the pharmacies to order prescriptions for patients from the practice directly, without the patient contacting us. There have been a number of events, when we have been sending scripts to the pharmacies at their request, but the patient has not collected the pharmacy or is no longer wanting those medicines. The practice is not informed, the scripts are not collected or collected and not used therefore leading to wastage with large number of unused medicines. It is also a safety risk, as the practice doesn’t know the patient is not collecting the prescription or not taking the medicines. 

The discussion was should we change so that only patients can request their medication rather than pharmacies.

The PPG felt that some patients, have excellent relationships with their community pharmacies, and them being able to order on their behalf is very helpful for the patients.

Practice pharmacist team are aware there are patients who are unable to request their repeat medications via the 3 methods we have and therefore need their nominated pharmacy to request on their behalf.

NHS England have suggested that we limit accepting requests from nominated pharmacies and encourage all patients to request their own medications directly from us.

Following a lengthy discussion it was be agreed that rather than brining in a blanket policy, we should contact the nominated pharmacies and work with them to double check they are not ordering medications that have not been requested by patients and get their opinions on other ways they can check what they are requesting for patients.  Nicole Lynch agreed to take this action over.

PPG members also wanted to discuss ordering medicine prior to holidays. The members on the call felt it worked well and wanted to praise the team. Mr Patel said that we needed to remind all patients that for the practice pharmacy team to issue appropriately the patients should  remember to give exact dates of travels to have enough medications to cover their time away.

Cancel & Check Telephone system

Dr Katz informed members that the practice will be launching an automated system to the surgery telephone line called Cancel and Check feature which allows patients to check their appointment dates/times and cancel any appointments they have booked.

This service will be live 24 hours a day.

This system should help minimise the call queues and allow call handlers to attend to other complex queries patients may have.

PPG Members thought this was a good idea and welcomed the development.

Staff wellbeing surgery

This survey was for all our Grand Union staff to give management feedback on what’s working well and what improvements we need to make for staff retention.

Management had a great feedback from staff and will look into arranging the suggestions.

Some suggestions included: documents/letters to be done by AI, surgery providing lunch, some parts of the building needs redoing, sending out more warning letters to patients who are rude, aggressive to staff members this will be a strict move to help protect our staff and encourage a safer working environment.

All these suggestions will be taken on board and actioned as possible.

MORI Survey

Dr NK explained that - Annually we received the IPSOS MORI GP Patient Survey. We always discuss this with the PPG to see if there is any improvement we can make.  This is a survey that is sent to patients across the country every year, 936 went out to our patients and we only received back 112 responses.

Results were screen-shared with all PPG members and a copy of the results will also be available on our surgery website to view.

We discussed the findings, the PPG were surprised regarding the website feedback as they find it easy to use. They think it might have been that we were using PATCHs for online consulting which required another log in, which was annoying. They were pleased the practice had replaced that system. Overall the questioned the significance as such a small sample in over 20,000 patients.

Patient access surgery

We then discussed the patient access survey, which the practice send to all patients in July and August. We had received over 780 responses. As the survey not yet closed (closing on 31st August) we agreed to discuss the results at the next PPG. Everyone felt that this would likely give us more useable data, as it is an easier survey to complete and the sample size bigger. There was a feeling though that there are too many surveys and too much request for patient feedback.

CQC visit

The surgery received a notification from CQC to say they will be visiting Grand Union on Wednesday 9th September 2026.

They would like to speak to PPG members if any are happy to consent to a discussion with them. CT said she is happy to be put forward for a discussion with CQC.

Flu jabs

As soon as we start our flu campaign invites will be sent out as bulk sms, emails and call invites will be made, this happens in stages starting with our first vulnerable cohorts.