Regent Health Primary Care Network (PCN)

The access approach in 26/27:

Our practice and PCN were able to draw useful insights from the work completed in 25/26 and we want to build on it.

1. We will continue to answer a minimum of 90% telephone calls within 10 minutes
2. We will carefully monitor appointments made available to our NHS111 colleagues and ensure there is adequate availability using our practice list size as a guide.
3. We will provide staff (NHS ambassadors) to help patients download and use the NHS app. To align with this we will continue to increase the number of patients at our practice registered with the NHS app.
4. Practices within the network with identify more patients that would benefit from continuity of care (minimum 3% of registered list size). We will also carry out an audit on a sample of this cohort of patients (20%) to see if the continuity approach above if effective.
5. We will continue to be transparent with our patients on the work we plan to do on access.
6. Our PCN will identify under-represented cohorts in the locality and with the assistance of a clinical and non-clinical champion hold four patient engagement events to improve access.
7. In 26/27 we will run another survey for patients and aim to achieve a return rate of 4% + we will aim to have a more even spread across practices and ensure all patient cohorts are represented. Our 25/26 survey told us that a large number of respondents are aware of digital solutions ‘but are not confident’; our 26/27 survey will aim to understand this more. A significant number of patients state they ‘don’t know how to use them’. We will build our new survey to collect more information to understand how we can overcome the lack of confidence.