Kings Medical Practice News www.kingmedicalpractice.co.uk

The surgery is only closed for the two bank holiday days – Good Friday and Easter Monday. We close on Thursday 1 st April at 6.30 pm, we have our normal Saturday morning surgery, 8.00 am to 11.00 am, for routine booked appointments and we re-open as normal on Tuesday 6 th April at 8.00 am. Outside of these times to get medical help or advice ring the normal telephone number – 0844 815 1340 – and you will be put through to the Out of Hours service. We wish all our patients and blog readers a good Easter, although looking at the weather forecast it looks like it will be a wet one!

From out website www.kingsmedicalpractice.co.uk it is now possible to order repeat prescriptions and make/cancel appointments. When you click on the big buttons labelled BOOK, REQUEST or REGISTER you are taken to the systmonline internet page where you can book and cancel appointments, request repeat prescriptions and register if you are a new patient. In order to be able to do this you need to get a username and password. To do this either come to reception in person with something that proves your identity such as a bank card, utility bill, passport or drivers licence or ask the doctor next time you are in surgery. When you logon for the first time you are able to change your password to something more memorable and you can see the repeats that you are allowed to order, your appointment history and appointments that you are able to request. For Kings Medical Practice using systmonline to order repeats works very well. When you order your repeat it is sent as a task for our prescript...

The Summary Care Record has been in the news again this week with the BMA writing to the Department of Health expressing serious concerns that the roll out of the programme is going too quickly with not enough consultation with patients. The Summary Care Record is a national IT system whereby patients address details, medication, allergies, hospital appointments and past medical history will all be held on a central database and will allow anyone treating you to see this data. This will be very useful for doctors seeing you at hospital or as an emergency because they will know what drugs you are taking, what you have had in the past and if anything has been recorded about any allergies or sensitivities you have had. To access this information staff will have to access it via a SmartCard, will only be able to look at your information if they are treating you as a patient and the information they will see will depend on their role. So a receptionist will not see the same details that a d...

Congratulations this week to three of our trainees who have taken the MRCGP Consulting Skills Assessment exam and have all passed – well done to Dr Aditya Narkar, Dr Linda Halliwell and Dr Duncan Marlow. The practice is a training practice and has doctors attached to the practice who wish to become GPs. These doctors will generally have done two years in hospital after they qualify and then join a three year GP training scheme. When they are attached to us they are either in the second or third year of their training scheme, so they have been training for at least four or five years after they have qualified at University. In order to become GPs they have to be a member of the Royal College of General Practitioners and obtain the qualification MRCGP. In order to get MRCGP they have to pass three assessments. The first assessment is a multiple choice exam about applying knowledge they have learnt to patients they might see in general practice. The second is a collection of Work Place Ba...

The practice website is now up, running and probably error free (*). You can access the website at www.kingsmedicalpractice.co.uk From the website patients are able to access our online services. Patients can request repeat prescriptions and book appointments. To do this you need to first register and get a username and password by coming to reception with proof of your identity, such as a passport or driving licence, and our administration staff can give you a username and password. It is very easy to do and with two clicks all staff can generate patients a username and password. When you access the online services you can order any repeat prescriptions that you are allowed and send a message with the request. You can also book some appointments. Currently we have just set it up so that our extended hour’s appointments are available; Saturday mornings, early morning and late evening surgeries. You can also see appointments you have made in the past and appointments in the future. On ...

Treating women with cystitis seems fairly straightforward. Unlike many conditions. in women who attend with cystitis bacterial infection is likely to be present and treating women who complain of symptoms alone is cost effective. However treating on the basis of symptoms alone would mean that 10% of our adult female patients would receive antibiotics each year. Is there a better way of doing this and as the boys on *Top Gear say – how difficult can it be? In the BMJ this week is an editorial and three linked research papers which have investigated how best to manage individual patients and how to reduce the number of antibiotics GPs prescribe. The conclusions of these papers are however unclear. The use of MSU is unhelpful and expensive (if you delay prescribing till you get the result of an MSU women have more symptoms). Beyond this the best next approach is unclear. Prescribing based on patients symptoms, or a delayed prescription (that is advising women to start antibiotics if thei...

The practice is set an annual budget for our prescribing costs. This is the costs of drugs that we prescribe. This year the budget is £1,603,110 and Wakefield Primary Care Trust has several ways of trying to get the practice to keep to this budget. The PCT has sent one of their pharmacy technicians to do various things with our prescribing. So far this year she has swapped patients from an expensive osteoporosis prevention drug to a more cost effective (i.e. cheaper on) and this week she rationalised seven patients Pregabalin treatment and made a potential saving of £5,400 per year. Pregabalin is a drug used in epilepsy and for neuropathic pain and all the drug doses amounts cost the same. A 50 mg capsule costs the same as 100mg and we had a few patients taking two 50 mg casules that she swapped to 100mg – easy if you know how! There is an incentive scheme whereby if we can keep our prescribing cost growth down to below 6.9% then if the practice achieves some quality indicators we ar...