It seems pretty clear that the main plank of government policy towards patients is: let them book their GP appointments online.
The new contract says that 25% must be available online, and they are investing £6.3m in the NHS App with appointment booking the headline feature.
Yet we all know that anything which requires compulsion or bribery is probably a BAD IDEA. The badder it is, the bigger the bung. Good ideas have a life of their own and no government can stop them.
Online appointment booking has been a contractual item for years, and yet while everything travel, banking or retail is online, only about 4% of GP appointments have gone that way. The technology is there already – it’s the GPs who don’t want to release appointments for self booking.
They know that without reception as the intermediary, many will be taken by patients who don’t need them, reducing equity of access for those in greater need. They are even paying receptionists from their own profits to suffer all the stress of turning patients away, rather than put everything online and leave the phone off the hook.
Yet we know that when they trust the practice to give them the help they need, patients don’t even want appointments. We ask them how they would like to be contacted and were astonished to find the average at only 25% by face to face, some down at 11%, GPs begging them to come in.
“Super service thank you for implementing it. Much easier than an appointment” wrote a lady in Somerset today.
So we turn to the Pilot Evaluation of the NHS App. Credit for publishing this for comment within 3 months, but let’s look at the detail:
34 practices, given lots of on site support and training over 3 months to 21/12/18
3,192 patients used it
337 appointments booked, and 106 cancelled.
Now I’m “just saying”, as they say, but in the same period and with only 28 practices we had 100,000 patient submissions on askmyGP. No appointments were booked directly, but they all got help and about 30,000 had a face to face.
We’re coming up to eight years old as a company and I’ve found it necessary many times to do the opposite of the zeitgeist. There’s never any guidance on being counterintuitive and it’s very costly, but what keeps me going is that it works.
I was at a Leicester practice this week for their training and the enthusiasm they have is infectious. Next week a couple more launch in Sheffield and Glasgow. They are all paying for themselves, taking control of their own workload. It’s becoming unstoppable.
Two quick things to do now so as to see the difference:
1. Do the patient demo and get how easy it is, without being able to book an appointment at Bramley Demo Surgery.
2. See how easy it is to respond by signing up to the GP Demo, triage 50 real patient requests.
Summer is coming, don’t spend evenings in the practice.
Would you allow patients to book online?
It seems pretty clear that the main plank of government policy towards patients is: let them book their GP appointments online.
The new contract says that 25% must be available online, and they are investing £6.3m in the NHS App with appointment booking the headline feature.
Yet we all know that anything which requires compulsion or bribery is probably a BAD IDEA. The badder it is, the bigger the bung. Good ideas have a life of their own and no government can stop them.
Online appointment booking has been a contractual item for years, and yet while everything travel, banking or retail is online, only about 4% of GP appointments have gone that way. The technology is there already – it’s the GPs who don’t want to release appointments for self booking.
They know that without reception as the intermediary, many will be taken by patients who don’t need them, reducing equity of access for those in greater need. They are even paying receptionists from their own profits to suffer all the stress of turning patients away, rather than put everything online and leave the phone off the hook.
Yet we know that when they trust the practice to give them the help they need, patients don’t even want appointments. We ask them how they would like to be contacted and were astonished to find the average at only 25% by face to face, some down at 11%, GPs begging them to come in.
“Super service thank you for implementing it. Much easier than an appointment” wrote a lady in Somerset today.
So we turn to the Pilot Evaluation of the NHS App. Credit for publishing this for comment within 3 months, but let’s look at the detail:
Now I’m “just saying”, as they say, but in the same period and with only 28 practices we had 100,000 patient submissions on askmyGP. No appointments were booked directly, but they all got help and about 30,000 had a face to face.
We’re coming up to eight years old as a company and I’ve found it necessary many times to do the opposite of the zeitgeist. There’s never any guidance on being counterintuitive and it’s very costly, but what keeps me going is that it works.
I was at a Leicester practice this week for their training and the enthusiasm they have is infectious. Next week a couple more launch in Sheffield and Glasgow. They are all paying for themselves, taking control of their own workload. It’s becoming unstoppable.
Two quick things to do now so as to see the difference:
1. Do the patient demo and get how easy it is, without being able to book an appointment at Bramley Demo Surgery.
2. See how easy it is to respond by signing up to the GP Demo, triage 50 real patient requests.
Summer is coming, don’t spend evenings in the practice.
Harry Longman
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