Burnham-On-Sea Medical Centre has this week reassured patients that staffing levels are not being reduced despite “unprecedented demand” for its services.
Speaking to Burnham-On-Sea.com, Debbie Hale, Management Partner at Burnham & Berrow Medical Centre, says: “We appreciate patient concerns about staff numbers at the Practice and would like to reassure our patients that we have not reduced our staffing levels.”
“However, as with many other surgeries across the country, we are currently experiencing unprecedented demand for our services as the public comes out of lockdown, putting additional strain on the Practice.”
Her comments come after a survey run by the BMA in the last week reported that 52% of primary and secondary care doctors have little to no confidence they will be able to manage patient demand once normal NHS services fully resume. The survey of 4,000 doctors across the UK, carried out between 6th and 12th August, also found that 43% of respondents believe that even without a second spike of Covid-19, it will take between 3-12 months for GP consultation to return to pre-pandemic levels of capacity, if not longer.
Debbie adds: “We have been working hard in very difficult circumstances during lockdown with the vast majority of consultations moving rapidly from surgery consultations to telephone / video consultations.”
“As the clinicians have been dealing with often complex problems on the phone, this takes as long or longer than a surgery consultation and so there has been no extra time created. Our patients have generally understood the reasons for these changes and we would like to thank them for working with us as things were introduced rapidly and as a necessity.”
“For those patients who have still needed to see a clinician face to face at the Surgery, please remember that the staff member has had to take the time to dress in full PPE (face mask, visor, apron and gloves), which are changed for every patient. In between patients, the clinician has also had to clean down their room.”
“This has been to protect both patients and clinicians. Due to these necessary actions the time for each face to face consultation has greatly increased. Unfortunately, the number of clinicians has not, putting additional pressures on the staff to manage more patient care.”
“We have made the decision to continue not to open our doors to enable patients to come into the Surgery to speak directly with the receptionists. The reason behind this is that we have a duty of care under Health & Safety legislation to keep our staff and those patients who do need to attend the Surgery for their appointments safe.”
“We will be of no help to our patients if we have to close due to a Covid-19 infection as has happened at local public houses recently. Thank you to everyone who has attended the Surgery and who has worn a mask – it is much appreciated. Those of you who have been into the Surgeries will see that we have also introduced screens at Reception to protect the receptionists.”
“People not being able to come into the Reception at either Surgery to request appointments or to ask about other queries as they would previously have done has put a huge strain on our telephone system and our staff are working hard to cope with the greatly increased number of telephone calls.”
“We understand your frustrations about how difficult it is to get through to us and that you would like to express this to the member of staff you speak to. However, every phone call that takes longer due to this need means that the phone lines are blocked for other patients, thereby making a difficult situation worse. We would ask that you help us to help you by not complaining about the system – we are working as hard as we can to improve things for everyone.”
“We are currently setting up access to us via an online consultation system, which will reduce pressures on the phone lines and hope to have this up and running in September. However, please bear in mind that the clinicians will need to take the necessary time to review requests sent to us in this way and this will necessarily reduce availability elsewhere.”
