Dr Farzana Hussain: I’m Farzana Hussain, I’m a GP and I work in The Project Surgery
which is in Plaistow in Newham. I’m a single handled GP and I work part time, although
being single handed it’s never quite part time. I’m also a mum of two; I have a list
size of just over 4,000 patients and I work in an area which is one of the most deprived
areas of the country which it brings its own challenges.
Ever since I went to medical school, I wanted to enter general practice. I wanted to help
people and save lives and in the sad times when we can’t save lives, I wanted to comfort
people. I really wanted to make these videos diaries to share my quality improvement journey.
I’ve learnt so many things that are seemingly simple, yet so powerful and I used them every
day. Talking to friends and colleagues, I realised that they feel quite isolated and
I think that if we could share even one or two of the tips that we could make a difference,
not just to the patients in my surgery but to the patients over the country.
In November 2013 a tragedy hit the practice, I was part of a two partner practice and I
had been working in the surgery since it opened in 2003. My partner and best friend, Peter
actually committed suicide in November 2013. This left me as a single handed partner and
I very much wanted to carry on all the great work and the quality work that Peter had aspired
to.
I worried about whether I would be able to do this, as I had two young children who were
aged 9 and 10 at the time, and I was really looking for something to make sure that I
could carry on the work and improve the work that I was doing with my patients, to improve
their health and the moral of the staff that I worked with.
I went on the General Practice Improvement Leaders Programme and I was introduced to
a model called the Change Model. Its simplicity is fantastic and one of the elements of that
is leadership by all. It really changed the way I worked up until then I had been quite
bogged down with wanting to do everything myself.
I came back to the practice and I started working more closely with my health care assistant.
Previously patients who had high blood pressure had a 10 minutes consultation with the GPs
who would measure their blood pressure and then make appropriate management decisions
and prescribe.
After the course, I decided that actually leadership was something that everyone could
partake in and now the healthcare assistant sees the patients who have high blood pressure
and does a consultation with them, and then I have a two to three minute telephone consultation
with my healthcare assistant just to do the prescribing and the management and then she
can tell the patient the decisions I’ve made. This has reduced GP workload and has
freed up access for patients. My healthcare assistant also loves it because it’s given
her more autonomy and it’s made our team far more cohesive.
So we’re currently in the middle of summer and we have a lot of hay fever sufferers asking
for GP appointments. I learnt about the Plan, Do, Study, Act cycle and we planned what we
were going to do as a team. I was very nervous about asking receptionists to sign post patients
to our locate pharmacists who can also treat patients for hay fever. I wondered if the
patient would still insist that they wanted to speak to their GP but as we planned it
and we spoke together as a team, I realised that reception were really on board to sign
post patients and didn’t think it would be a problem.
Having then moved onto the study element we found that it was working really well and
now we barely see any patients with hay fever and this has freed up about 10% of our GP
consultation time.