The Forum chaired a very successful joint meeting with the U3A at Bridlington Spa on Monday 16th October. This was the Forum's third presentation at the U3A within the past year.
With an audience of over 200 people, our guest speaker was William Uglow from the ICB. His official title is “Assistant Director of Primary Care, Transformation and Integration NHS Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care Board".
He explained the need for the reorganisation of local GP Practices and how they are going to continue to improve over the coming months. Both practices have a shared plan to tackle the 8am rush, so patients should no longer be asked to call back another day to book an appointment. Patients deserve to know on the day they contact their practice how their request will be managed:
a. If their need is clinically urgent it should be assessed on the same day by a telephone or face-to-face appointment. If the patient contacts their practice in the afternoon they may be assessed on the next day, where clinically appropriate.
b. If their need is not urgent, but it requires a telephone or face-to-face appointment, this should be scheduled within two weeks.
c. Where appropriate, patients will be signposted to self-care or other local services (eg community pharmacy or self-referral services). He went on to inform the audience that there have been problems, but they have started to develop new ways of working which ensures alignment of both practices. They now have a very good shared Care Home support system in place. They have recruited more clinicians to support the GPs and have introduced some Extended Access appointments for patients on evenings and Saturdays. The Practices are now sharing best practice to help increase patient access, including details of new telephone systems, so the calls to the practices should be answered more efficiently in future.
The audience asked a range of questions and seemed very satisfied with the answers. Many commented that they had seen improvements in both Practices.
The Health Forum attended another meeting in the afternoon with the Director of the Local ICB and learnt about how they intended to further develop the Frailty Service which is currently being trailed in Bridlington to support some of our most frail local residents. We were informed that some Nurse lead Urology clinics will be starting in Bridlington Hospital later this year. This is fantastic news and will continue to reduce the need for some patients to travel to Malton or York.
Bridlington Health Forum continues to increase its membership, which means we can say that we represent a significant number of local residents.
Our next Public meeting will take place at Bridlington North Library on Monday 13th November 2023 at 10:00. Further details and guest speakers will be published online the week before.
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