Category: 5.1. Achieving patient-friendly services
The Barton Surgery is the only practice in the seaside town of Dawlish in Devon. It has ten doctors and 13,000 patients. During the holiday season, pressure mounts because the practice has to deal with more patients with fewer clinicians available.
When staff were under pressure, Practice Manager Janine Payne noticed that customer service levels slipped. Using her experience in the private sector, she began to focus on customer care during the practice’s quarterly training sessions. These take place when the practice closes on Thursday afternoons to carry out staff training.
In these customer service sessions, staff discuss best practice in private sector customer care and talk about how it can be applied in the scenarios that they encounter every day.
Topics include:
The practice invited an expert to come and talk to staff about neuro-linguistic programming – turning questions around so that an obvious negative answer becomes positive.
This training helped staff to be more helpful for a while, but a lot of reiteration was needed to maintain service quality. For example, when there is high telephone volume first thing on Monday morning, it’s harder to remember response approaches that might not come naturally.
So staff are given constant reminders. Staff meetings take place every two to three weeks, and the issue of customer care is raised in every meeting.
‘We need to remember that our patients are our customers and they deserve the same good service they would expect in a local supermarket. It’s about valuing and respecting each other, and it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves about that often,’ says Janine.
Janine Payne
Janine.payne@nhs.net
