FPM’s Practice of the Month - Dashwood Medical Practice

By First Practice Management
In
Posted Monday February 8, 2021

FPM’s Practice of the Month - Dashwood Medical Practice

Our FPM Practice of the Month is back for 2021 and we are delighted to showcase Dashwood Medical Practice.

We have been in touch with the Practice Manager Louise Pilcher who shared how the practice is engaging with the local community, how the practice is coming with Covid-19 and more.

What is your patient list size? 11,500

What is the main demographic of your practice?

Our local population is mixed in terms of age groups, with some cohorts of deprivation areas.

We’d love to hear about how you engage with your local community.

We do a lot of outreach work via the community team for housebound and other care support from our ART team Active response team, as well as working with care agencies. We are very active with our social prescribing, signposting patients to support groups in the area, but also building a network of contacts, like SECAMB (our local ambulance service), maintaining contact with them like a simple ‘thank you’ to the crew for attending one of our patients. We stay in touch with our local FD services’ family and relatives so we can offer the correct level of support during very difficult and sad times.

Which services that you offer patients are you particularly proud of?

We’ve worked hard with our Treatment Pathways and care plans, supporting all ages and sending congratulation letters to newborn babies’ families. We have a great team who work on our Bookings process, where we contact patients and work on times and appointments with them so we can plan safety and reduce risk if they really need to visit the practice. We always work hard to have a positive approach and being honest with a patient when arranging care.

We also have a 'TLC list' for patients lonely or isolated so we do regular checks on their mental health as well as health issues - our admin staff do it all, they are amazing.

As a Practice manager I'm very proud of the whole team working in Dashwood MC.

What is the best thing about working at your practice?

Teamwork and good communication

How is your Practice coping with Covid-19?

Every day we manage the day's work plan support for both staff and patients, and we make sure that we keep everything safe and clean. We also chat with every contact we have either by phone, email visits or face to face.

What roles within the practice are working from home?

Some clinical staff and administration are working from home when needed.

How is the practice managing the workload?

Every day we pride ourselves on working in real-time to ensure everything is to hand in a patients record when its needed for review. We vet and action every request coming in and again good communication in the practice.

How are you and the team feeling?

A mixture of both lows and highs and our team is really working hard on the rollout of the vaccination programme, carefully with support. We also set a calendar event every month for staff to get involved. For example, we asked our staff to bring a childhood or a baby photo to put on the Christmas tree and then we all had to guess who is who. We also organise bake competitions. Our next social event is a quiz night zoom meeting and a lip-sync battle with our neighboring practices.

Has your team gone over and above? Want to showcase the fantastic work of your Primary Care team? You could be the next FPM Practice of the Month! Send us an email.