>>Dr Farzana Hussain: So last month, we wanted to try and increase the number of appointments
that patients are booking online. I learnt about the Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycle
on my GP Improvement Leaders programme. We had used the ‘Planning’ stage of the PDSA
cycle to implement and hopefully increase the number of online appointments that are
booked, and we wanted to then move on to the ‘Doing’ stage and the ‘Studying’ stage.
So in the last three weeks, we’ve had 24 patients that have booked appointments online.
While this is not as high as I would have wanted, it is as high as I would have expected
because change does take time and knowing this from my GP Improvement Leaders programme
has helped me not give up and not feel bad about the situation.
FH: So Shuzna, how do you think the online booking appointment is going? What’s the
uptake doing?
SB: Well from the 4th of September we start doing online appointments, before that we
were getting patient booking online at one per day, but now we get three to four per
day and then when patient’s call us and the lines are busy we can tell them you can
book appointments online.
SB: After we advertised it, we put posters up. Everyday patients are coming for online
log in details.
FH: So are getting people wanting log ins?
SB: Everyday I’ve being printing out log in details for patients to book
appointments online.
Yes, so some of the benefits we didn’t expect from online appointments was patients started
looking at their results online and sometimes patients will come asking for copies of the
blood test and then we’ll tell them you can log in online and print it out online.
Saves them money as well because there is a fee normally for a print out.
FH: So that’s great they can do it for free and I imagine these also would have been phone
calls before, wouldn’t they?
SB: When they call, some patients want us to order prescriptions over the phone for
them, but once I introduced online appointments they started ordering the prescriptions online
as well.
FH: So they can look at their results, they can order their prescriptions, those secondary
benefits.
SB: Because it’s only booking appointments, we advertise it for booking appointments but
once they log in they can see they have access to nursing appointments, viewing their records,
blood test results, hospital letters, ordering prescriptions online.
Dr Farzana Hussain: Apart from the 24 appointments being booked online, we also studied that some of those
appointments were being booked at times like 2am. This was really interesting for me as
previously patients had not had the chance to do this, and I wondered if knowing that
they had a guaranteed appointment with the GP first thing in the morning may lead to
unavoidable hospital admissions, or turning up to casualty in the night when we feel a
little afraid.
So moving to the act phase of the PDSA cycle, we wanted to actively promote our online booking
more. We had a meeting with the Patient Participation Group and one of our patient reps has kindly
volunteered to help and support people who are having some trouble logging in and using
the system. We’ve also found that when doctors promote the service it’s very powerful and
patients come straight out of their room and ask for log in details and want to know how
to book online, so we’re going to keep this in mind and keep the awareness amongst the
team and active promotion amongst the team going.