Enter and View: Water Eaton Medical Centre

The purpose of this Enter and View programme was to engage with patients, their relatives, or carers, to explore their overall experience of Water Eaton Medical Centre.

Summary

• A total of 40 patients and their family members took part in these conversations.
• Water Eaton Health Centre is a branch of Whaddon Healthcare and registers patients from a wide area of Milton Keynes.
• Many of the Water Eaton patients we spoke to have been registered with the practice from birth and are now over 70 years of age.
• The practice is open from 8am to 6.30pm Monday to Friday and they have Early bird hours on Wednesdays & Fridays opening at 7am to 8am. They are staffed by both Doctors, Nurses, HCA’s, Nurse Practitioner, Pharmacist and Midwifery Team. There were two members of staff at reception for most of the day during our visit.
• The people we spoke to said they didn’t fully understand why there had been changes made to the way the practice operates and felt that the changes tended to make things more complicated for them. People were frustrated that they didn’t get to go to ‘their’ practice, and this was more evident when talking to people who had to pay for transport to attend an appointment made at a different practice than they had registered with.

What patients told us:

“System is not self-explanatory.” 

“You don’t know if you will get a response or not, you’re just left hanging waiting for a response to the online form.”

"If I fill the form out for my kids I get a response – funny that I never get a response when I need an appointment.”

Our recommendations include:

• Consider tasking the PPG, a social prescriber or admin team member to offer ‘Tech Support/ training’ sessions for the AccuRx system, possibly in the waiting room on a regular but short-term basis. This would enable more of the patient base to get up and running with the system, answering their questions would go a long way towards increasing their understanding of the ’how and why’ of the new system.
• Consider an exercise to evaluate barriers for patients using online systems which could highlight opportunities to build trust in online access systems and support patients to use them, freeing up telephone lines for patients who are digitally excluded.
• Consider giving more information to patients around how you manage demand; making people aware of the number of administrative staff that work on answering calls at peak times will help patients understand the pressures that staff face during these busy times.