>>Liz Walke: This is the Lighthouse Practice in Eastbourne. They’ve got 2 surgeries and
I’ve been a patient here for 26 years. It’s a very friendly practice and I’m actually
Vice Chair of the Patient Forum. >>Amanda Sayer: We’ve been signing up people
for online access for 3 or 4 years now. We started off with people being able to book
appointments via online and prescriptions, repeat prescriptions and now people can view
their records online and I think we’re up to about 3700 people now signed up for the
service. >>Dr Tim Caroe: Patient online services are
really important to us here at the practice. It’s useful for us to have patients being
able to look and find out what’s going on with their care. So it’s not just us telling
them what’s going on but instead we can share the care with them, they can find out
the information for themselves and contact us and talk about what’s going on.
>>Amanda Sayer: The patient forum are involved in absolutely everything we do in the practice
and as part of that we work together to think of the best way to promote things to the wider
patient group. And whether that’s via a newsletter, whether that’s via the website
whether that’s via our practice booklet or other letters or communication that we
send out. >> Amanda Sayer: Today the patient forum are
coming in and we’ll be sitting and looking at some of the articles that we’ve got ready
for the newsletter and putting something together hopefully to start to look at themes and trends
and articles that we should have in the next newsletter.
>> Conversation at patient meeting (Amanda): Penny sent me something for the new, newsletter.
>>Liz Walke: The patient newsletter is an excellent way to get messages out to patients
because it’s in a readable form, people can read it whenever they like, they can pick
it up and it looks attractive. You can also download it. So we try and put information
on that – so for example we would put patient online in that and we promote that.
>>Gwynne Pickering: Well we try to get articles that are signposting articles that explain
to people the advantage of going online.
>>Dr Tim Caroe: One of the key things about promoting online access is to have it embedded across the spectrum of everything that you
are doing. So for example when we send letters out to people for one thing, we can put a
tag at the bottom just explaining about online access.
>>Receptionist: OK, so have you signed up for online patient access?
>>Dr Tim Caroe: We let all our staff know about patient online access so that when someone
comes to the desk or they’re on the phone they use that opportunity to talk about it.
>>Receptionist: Is it something that you’d be interested in doing? (Could be yeah.)
>>Bridget Swinburne: That’s the best moment in time to actually suggest people go online
when they come in and actually ask for results, as we’ve had a few doing this afternoon
at the front desk and several answering the phone, that’s usually the best moment to
catch them. >>Amanda Sayer: We’ve taken a whole team
approach to promoting patient online access at the practice. Staff have been trained,
they’ve attended meetings, they take every opportunity they can now to communicate to
patients the benefit of going online and using the online services.
>>Amanda Sayer: We hope we’ve made it easy for people to sign up to patient online services.
One way we’ve done that is by having it on our website so that patients can link directly
through to a link on the website, through to our clinical system and sign up to the services with ease.
>>Liz Walke: The Facebook page is really brilliant for the Patient Forum because it means that people can literally can go online
there and they can get instant replies and it’s an excellent way to actually promote
patient online because they’re online anyway.
>>Amanda Sayer: We’re doing very well for signing up for online access but I think we can always do more and I think we should be
in a position where everybody who has a computer or has the internet at home, has the ability
to use online access and finds it that they can use it and use it effectively.
>>Dr Tim Caroe: Patient online access is really revolutionary in its concept, it’s about
helping people to manage their own health, to have their own information so they can
see what’s going on. Medicine has always been quite hierarchical in the past about
telling people about what’s going on. This involves a radical shift of that relationship
and empowers people, so that we can share their care and that together we can help them be better.