It has been a few weeks since I have updated you on our service levels so I wanted to clarify what you can expect over the next few weeks and more specifically, as we move into September.
We are aware our waiting time for ROUTINE AskMyGP requests is too long. The queue recently spiked at a 3 week turnaround, and this is not acceptable. Before I talk about solutions, I just wanted to explain why it had gotten worse, and then we can look at how it will get better.
Over the past few weeks we have started to be affected by annual holidays for our clinical team, which always puts a strain on resources. We have had a mixture of holidays and illnesses in the clinical team (thank you COVID) as well as members of staff who have needed time off for other reasons.
This leaves us depleted. Usually we would top this up with locums, but we have already been using a variety of locums to get us through, so we couldn’t finance further resource. As I write this, we are currently allocating requests from the 9th of July, whilst dealing with 1 GP on holiday for 2 weeks, 1 GP off poorly and 2 poorly registrars.
Our capacity completely changes on 16th August – that is the day we are counting down to. On that day, 3 trainee GPs and 3 registrars go live. This instantly gives us a boost. They will also be joined by Dr Yusuf, a new salaried GP, and after the August bank holiday, we are joined by another salaried GP, Dr Chidinma. So we know the solution is there, we just need to get to August 16th.
I thought it might be helpful to share some numbers with you. Our patient base is somewhere around 17,500 and each week, we receive about 1000 requests to see a GP or a member of our actute team (so I am excluding here our practice nurses and our HCAs).
Recently, we have only had capacity to deal with anywhere from 650-800 requests – and this is how the backlog builds up. However, the week beginning 19th August our capacity increases to 975 for the week and from the 1st September it is steady at 1200, as we go through that entire month. We therefore know the backlog will be back within manageable, and more importantly, acceptable levels by the 2nd or 3rd week of September.
The last couple of months have been difficult for us to manage and I know they have been hard for all our patients. I genuinely thank you all for bearing with us, and look forward to providing more positive updates from September, when we will count down every day the current waiting time until we get it back to normal. Once we get there, we will also reset the expected service levels for routine requests so that you know the maximum length of time you will be waiting.
Thank you
Debbie