Bewbush Medical Centre

Reply from Bewbush Medical Centre
Mon, 01 Jul 2019 15:37:51 +0100

We were really sorry to read this review and that you feel your recent experience at our practice was so poor. You were however offered a telephone appointment which you refused and you were also offered an appointment at the access hub at Southgate Surgery. We were particularly short staffed last week due to staff sickness. The Access Hub was introduced in 2017, a number of Crawley GP practices joined together to provide extra appointments. They are extra on-the-day appointments, which are clinics that are hosted at various practices in the town throughout the week. These clinics give extra capacity to GP Surgery’s; this allows those patients with long-term conditions or more complex issues to see their own GP. Unfortunately like so many other practices across the country, we are under extreme pressure from the sheer demand and numbers of patients. We currently only have one GP and one Physician Associate working full time. We have been trying to recruit more GP’s over the past three but as yet without success. This has had an impact and will continue to have an impact on the amount of appointments we can offer. As the only GP, Dr. Kottyal, has an extremely high level of administration work, so we have had to rely heavily on locum GP’s who generally only see patients. We are aware that appointments are increasingly hard to obtain as we have seen a huge increase in patient demand, particularly for minor conditions that could be self-managed. Hospitals are discharging patients earlier after admissions and many conditions which were once managed in hospital now fall under the GP’s remit. We are not only managing patients who are ill, but much of our work now is about disease prevention and treating conditions such as blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and raised cholesterol, to stop them causing life-threatening illnesses in the future. Dr. Kottyal can regularly have more than fifty patient consultations in one day, be it face-to-face or by telephone. We have put certain measures in place to try to manage the workload with the clinical staff that we have. The first thing we have done is to insist that any one that moves out of Bewbush, must register at another Practice, to try to reduce our patient numbers which currently stands at just under 8,000 for one GP. We have also capped our list, which means we are not registering any new patients at this current moment in time. We do have a Practice Complaints Procedure for patients if they are unhappy with our service and we do appreciate it when a patient takes the time to let us know of any problems, as this enables us to investigate and review our practice policies. If you would like to contact the Deputy Practice Manager, she will be very happy to investigate any issues you may have.