St Johns Wood and Maida Vale 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. In 26/27 we will run a patient survey and aim to achieve the target of 4%. Collectively our practices will review the challenges that prevented reaching the return rate of 4% and plan to overcome them. We know that cost pressures on practices on sending SMS messages impacted return rate and so we will explore alternative approaches to reaching our patients and hearing their views. We plan to analyse why our network did not reach a 4% return rate and careful plan our campaign to ensure we hear from as many patients as possible, a minimum of 4%.
7. Our survey result informed us that while 55% of patients feel confident using digital tools many still prefer arranging health care on the telephone. We will plan a survey that addresses this point and builds on improving access locally.
8. 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.