DavidGrahamJones
Well-Known Member
I started my missive on another thread and it was so far off topic, I've started another thread, because the workings of our surgeries needs a bit of looking at.
Using the word "complied", seems to imply that the surgery hasn't done what it's supposed to do. It's not always that they haven't bothered, there's a lot of work involved in setting up online patient access, there is also some resistance not by doctors but by practice managers. Online systems are available so there's no systems development, but some surgeries, like my wife's have found that although they thought they were ahead of the game by getting into it before 2016, they now find the powers that be wanting them to use a different system which is adding to their costs. These systems generally also allow patients to make appointments online which you'd think was a good thing. It is for patients, although at my wife's surgery 4% of the patients are making 20% of the appointments and now they can do it without any form of triage. This is not fair on the other patients.
I've mentioned this before but getting involved in a surgery's Patient Participation Program, something else surgeries are encouraged to set up, is a real eye opener and allows insight into what really goes on in a doctor's surgery. My wife has spent a couple of days at her surgery encouraging patients to provide eMail addresses and mobile phone numbers so that the surgery can more easily provide appointment reminders to overcome the ridiculous number of "no shows". They managed to get 100 lots of details out of 11,000 patients, so obviously a better method of getting the details is required. Seems the receptionist believe that they are too busy, but I think it just needs a piece of paper for you to write name/D.O.B/eMail/mobile, nobody sees your details except the person at the surgery who enters the details. There is a problem with most elderly patients who have PCs, Tablets, mobiles, but don't use them.
It's worth baring in mind that when a surgery does start putting results online it may not put all of your old results online. My GP has told me categorically that only results received after a certain date will be available online. Th cost of digitising all the old records (mine go back to 1952) would be horrendous, well outside the budget of most practices. There's only 4,500 patients at my practice and three part time doctors, I understand the difficulty in getting everything online.
There are organisations that help with this "setting up" of digitised records. They look after all the paper records for a surgery and when somebody actually makes a request for their records online, the organisation digitises all of their records and makes them all available within a matter of days and therefore from then on. It costs money, obviously and not all surgeries have chosen that route, including mine, it's a business decision. I can still access my records, just not online before a certain date.
If you look at a document called "Patient list size and GP count by Practice" (should be available at https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/prescript...practice-list-size-and-gp-count-each-practice), you will see that some practices have less than 1,000 patients per doctor whereas others have 2,000 patients per doctor.
If you take a typical surgery in large towns with 10,000 patients and 5 doctors, you can imagine the problems digitising all the records of 10,000 people. If you then consider old geezers like me, it's probably only the last 20 years that are relevant to my current medical conditions anyway. Making records available online isn't a case of waving a magic wand and hey presto, it's done.