West End and Marylebone Primary Care Network (PCN)

The access approach – April 2026 to March 2027:

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 so that we can continuously improve our services in line with access demands. In WEM PCN we were able to see patients under 25 years were the least represented cohort of patients and so we will design our survey and approach with this in mind. Patients in the PCN are generally using digital tools to assist access but the vast majority said they were ‘using but not confident’. We plan to explore this with our patients in 26/27 to understand what the challenges to building confidence are and how we can address them.
7. 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.