St George’s and
|
     |
Link to Deanery |
 |
 |
|
|
|
Trainers
General Practice Training at Balham Park Surgery Balham Park Surgery is a friendly practice, whose aim is to provide patient centred care. We recognise the importance of each and every member of the practice team in achieving this objective. We were the first practice in England to achieve the Royal College of General Practitioners’ Quality Practice Award and have received the award for the second time in 2005. We are a PMS practice, with six partners and five salaried doctors. Several of the doctors have other commitments. Patrick Bower organises the medical care to Nightingale House, a 250 bed old people’s home, where Joanna Smail also does one session a week. Previna Chana and Clare Macmichael share the responsibility for teaching the medical students and Sangeeta Patel is a part-time lecturer in the Dept of General Practice at St George’s. Shona Lockie is a GP with a special interest in Paediatrics and Marietta Swanne has a special interest in gynaecological ultrasound. Shehla Baig runs the graduate entry medical student training programme at St George’s. In April 2002, we moved into new, purpose-built premises off Balham High Road. Our current list size is about 12,000 patients. The local population is very diverse. The surgery is open from 8am – 6.30pm Monday to Friday and on Saturday mornings there are routine surgeries with one of the GP’s and a practice nurse. We run some early morning and late evening surgeries which are intended for patients who work full time. A typical surgery during the week involves seeing 12-15 patients with 10 minute appointments. Baby clinics and minor operation/cryotherapy sessions are arranged at set times but otherwise antenatal care, family planning and chronic diseases are managed during normal surgeries. The District Nursing team and Health Visitors are based at the practice and we also have a psychologist and a physiotherapist working with us. We use the EMIS computer software and are paperless. Out of hours work is now the responsibility of Wandsworth Primary Care Trust who have contracted it out to Harmoni. We are committed to practising Evidence Based Medicine, look critically at our prescribing and try to follow agreed protocols for the management of most chronic diseases. Clinical meetings take place every fortnight and there are also liaison meetings with our CMHT psychiatrist. Critical event review meetings have led to important changes at the practice. All the doctors have annual in-house appraisals as well as their external appraisals. Balham Park Surgery was a NHS Beacon for management in General Practice. The partners and Natalie Goldsmid-Whyte, our manager, are keen to train and develop all our staff and the practice was successfully reassessed for Investors in People at the end of 2000. We have an active patient liaison group. The practice has been training GP registrars for over 10 years and teaching medical students from St George’s for much longer than that. Although the designated trainers are ultimately responsible for the training, our ethos is that it is a training practice and the registrar can benefit from the experience of many of the other doctors, nurses and managers as well. After an induction period meeting all the members of our team, the registrar gradually builds up his or her speed of working during surgeries over the next 3 to 4 months. A standard week for the GPR includes; 7 surgery sessions, half-day release course at St George’s on Thursday afternoons, half-day for study and a half-day off. If the half-day release course does not take place, the GPR does an eighth surgery session instead. When the registrar feels sufficiently confident, he or she does a baby clinic every third week. Out of hours training, after settling in, is 12 sessions (4-6 hours) during the year, in accordance with guidance from the London Deanery. These are supervised sessions with Harmoni and include time spent vetting emergency calls, working at a local Primary Care Centre, working at the Tooting Walk-In clinic and going out in a car to do home visits. The main teaching session is a tutorial for one and a half hours each week but discussing and dealing with problems as they arise is also important. It is essential that the registrar feels part of the practice team, enjoys the year and learns some of the skills of General Practice along the way. Andy Morgan, April 2006
| |||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
