Practice Eye: The Barton Surgery, Dawlish

Practice: The Barton Surgery
Location: Dawlish, Devon
Practice Manager: Janine Payne
Date of Practice Eye visit: 21.01.2010

Janine Payne in Dawlish has built a team of highly motivated staff and the warm reception I received was clearly an every day experience for their visitors. 

I admired the air of busy calm in the team.  Janine said "we want to engender pride in the NHS, for the staff and the patients".  The word "empowerment" comes to mind, but Janine put it more succinctly:

"They know they are trusted to take a task from beginning to end.  I believe you should ask for forgiveness not permission - if anything goes wrong, learn from it". 

Having registered their highest amount of complaints around calls coming in on an overworked hybrid of two older phone systems, the practice is responding in a positive way.  Using freed up resources they are installing a brand new phone system that will allow every call to be answered and enabling them to analyse workload peaks, record calls and identify callers.  With Chris, expert roster planner at the helm, making sure everyone is available for training, their patients will soon benefit from a much more efficient system.

The enormous agenda that practice managers cover in a day was clearly evident and I was in awe as Janine deftly moved from patient information packs, partnerships and finances, to staff management, legal negotiations and even a knowledge of what percentage of a new community hospital build must be spent on art. 

I did feel one crushing frustration as we toured the fantastic facilities.  On site there was a bright, clean community hospital, which was understandably the pride of the League of Friends who raised £500,000 for the facility.  Walking through I was shown room after well equipped room laying empty.  Janine had a grown up attitude about the constraints both practice and PCT had to work to, but as an outsider, I felt a sad desperation that the result of so much hard work and community spirit should be laying unused - the local community could get so much out of these beautiful facilities if only their were fewer "constraints".

 

I learnt so much, just by spending the day in a different environment, talking about different jobs and other challenges.  It sparked off several ideas that would be useful to me in my role, saving me hours of reading and fruitless research.

Who would you spend an hour with, that might save you two hours work?

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