Park Leys Medical Practice

In 2008 the DoH commissioned IPSOS-MORI to conduct a survey of patients to establish how they felt about their practice's performance. Some seven hundred patients, selected at random, will have received the survey forms through the post.

Many of the questions in this survey were similar to those in the GPAQ survey conducted by the practice, but others were targeted specifically at establishing how patients felt about their access to their practices. of particular interest were the ease of getting appointments in one or two days and the ease of booking apointments up to four weeks in advance. Satisfactory results in these key areas resulted in small additional payments being made to practices.

In 2009 the excercise has been repeated (some 700 forms were sent out, with 272 being completed) and detailed results have been published on The GP Patient Survey website. a feature of the site being that it is possible to compare the practice performance with the average scores from other practices in Coventry, the West Midlands and nationwide.

This year however satisfactory performance against key access criteria has been recognised by awarding QOF Points which have been removed from other areas of practice activity, so that the maximum points award for QOF remains 1000.

We have prepared an extract of the results showing these comparisons which can be downladed as a PDF file.

Overall the practice scored well in this survey with highlights being:

• the helpfulness of receptionists
• ease of contacting the practice by telephone
• ease of speaking to the doctor by telephone
• ease of getting an appointment in one or two days
• satisfaction with opening hours
• satisfaction with the care provided by doctors and nurses.

There were, however, two areas where we clearly need to do better:

• ease of booking appointments more than two days ahead
• ease of access to a doctor of choice.

We also think we should be able to improve the time patients wait to be seen when attending a surgery.

Perhaps not surprisingly these results largely mirror the results of the GPAQ survey, notably the less than satisfactory performance in the key areas of seeing a doctor of choice and being able to book appointments several days in advance. We are aware that these are impotant issues for patients and are doing our best to rectify the situation.

The lack of satisfaction with ease of booking appointments several days in advance has had an impact on our QOF performance, being responsible for the drop in our overall score for the year 2008/9.

One slightly curious outcome of the survey is that about 12% of the respondents felt that we should be open after 6.30 PM. We do open until 8.00PM on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and have done so for over a year. Some patients, perhaps those who do not contact us often, are clearly not fully aware of recent developments in the practice and we need to make a greater effort to inform patients of changes and developments.