Kings Medical Practice News www.kingmedicalpractice.co.uk

We are pleased to announce that the practice has started hosting an ultrasound service. An ultrasound scan is a procedure that uses high frequency sound waves to create an image of part of the inside of your body. As sound waves are used rather than radiation, the procedure is believed to be completely safe. Ultrasound scans can be used to help us diagnose problems in your liver, gallbladder, kidney, ovaries, uterus and many other organs. The service is paid for by the NHS and run by Specialist Medical Imaging Ltd - click here to go to their website. Currently our patients seem to wait ages for ultrasound scan and we hope that this new service will speed up the length of time patients have to wait. We are told that if we request a scan today it will be done either this week or next week. Now thats what I call quick ..........!

We have had quite a few staff changes over the last few weeks. Dr Rebecca Hilton has left us to become a GP partner at a practice in Bradford. Dr Hilton was a salaried doctor who had been with us since 2005. I would like to publicly thank her for all her hard work and commitment to our patients and the practice. We wish her all the best in her new practice. We have replaced her with Dr Johnathan Lewis - he is already doing some surgeries for the practice but starts full time in December. In addition we have a couple of doctors who are doing locums sessions for us whilst Dr Harding is on maternity leave. Dr Amy Kuck is doing two sessions a week for us at the moment and Dr Amesha Patel is joining us in December to fill the rest of Dr Hardings session. All of our new starters have had an induction period to introduce them to our practice staff, our procedures and last but not least the computer! This current week we are a bit short of doctors as we have more doctors on leave than we like,

Kings Medical Centre was built by RoK Building Ltd and early this week they went into administration. Click here for the full story on BBC News. We are not really surprised since in the summer they posted half year losses of £3.8 million. We are very sorry that the people we have established good working relationships at RoK will have lost their jobs and were initially anxious about what implications it might have for the building. We have been in the building just over 12 months and most of the major snags have been sorted out. There are a few mainly cosmetic things that need tidying up but they are fairly trivial and we have been told that we should sort them and send the account to administrators - we will be another creditor waiting to get paid! We understand that a lot of their suppliers had not been paid so it suddenly makes sense why the hot water boiler in the kitchen has not been replaced - because they had not paid for it in the first place! We are just very relieved that th

I have recently updated the pages on our website about some practice performance indicators. Click here to go directly to the pages. First the good news; 95% of our patients are satisfied or very satisfied with the overall care they have received from the surgery, patients say it is easy to get through to staff on the telephone and in the last 12 months 65,101 patients had an appointment at the surgery ... wow! To read the latest GP Patient Survey fact sheet click here . This fact sheet very clearly presents the practice GP Patient Survey results in comparison with both local and national practices. But, we did not achieve as many points in the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) as in previous year. Last year we nearly achieved full points, this year we only achieved 957 out of 1000. We think that the explanation for this is firstly, because we changed computer systems during the year and we did not realise that we were not coding things in the correct way to achieve full QOF point