Letter to Patients

Dear Barcroft patient

First of all we want to thank you for your patience over the past year. We appreciate that getting through to the practice and getting an appointment is harder than ever. In this letter we are not asking for sympathy or trying to make excuses but merely trying to explain why we are in this situation and what we are doing about it. Last month NHS England acknowledged that the demand from the public for GP appointments is greater than we are able to provide.  This is despite our clinical teams working well beyond their contracted hours and having more patient contacts every working day.

Over the past 3 years we have struggled with ill health affecting our clinical workforce. Two of our previous senior partners have been off sick for a year and then had to retire on medical grounds. Since then we have struggled to recruit to replace the sessions we have lost which has clearly had an impact on the numbers of appointments we can offer. One of the GP’s we recruited to replace some of these sessions, has herself been off sick since the spring with a serious medical condition. When medical staff are off sick we try and get locums in to replace the lost sessions but the reality is that we have really struggled to find locum doctors to do this. Practices are struggling to recruit GPs, nurses and administrative staff. We know there are currently over 45 GP vacancies in Wiltshire.

As well as access to appointments with a Doctor we understand that a lot of our patients struggle to get through on the phone to the practice. In the past few years there has been a significant increase in call volume into the practice. We have tried to keep up with this through increasing the number of phone lines and reception staff but are still struggling to recruit enough staff to fully man our reception team and answer the phones.

Actions we are taking :

• Moving forwards we have recently recruited a new physician’s associate who will provide some increased capacity and are actively trying to recruit more locum doctors to cover the long term sickness.
• We are going to be offering more appointments with other health professionals. These will include nurses, paramedics, physician associates, physiotherapists, and clinical pharmacists.  These colleagues also provide excellent care which may well be more suited to your needs.
• Within the reception team we have appointed 3 new staff who are currently being trained and due to join the team in the coming weeks. We will continue to monitor this situation and continue to recruit into this team.

As a practice we want to be able to provide the best possible medical care to all of our patients and want to reassure you that we are doing all that we can to improve the service that we offer. We appreciate your feedback, both positive and negative, as this will help us to shape the service that we provide. Please be mindful that all the team at Barcroft are working hard to maintain clinical services through a very challenging time and whilst negative feedback is very important to improve services it does impact the morale of the workforce and is often out of balance with the positive experience many of our patients experience every day.

Yours sincerely,

The Barcroft Partners