Quality Care Initiatives

Keeping up-to-date

All the staff at Lockside, including the doctors and nurses have annual appraisals which then become personal learning plans to ensure we keep up-to-date with changes in medicine.  We also ensure that our skills in all clinical areas are maintained.  The doctors' appraisals are carried out by specially trained GPs from neighbouring practices.

Clinical Protocols

For many medical conditions, especially long-term illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease and asthma we work to carefully designed practice protocols.  Each of these protocols have been based on the best available evidence and incorporate guidance from the National quality bodies such as NICE (the National Institure of Clinical Excellence) and the National Service Frameworks of the Departmant of health.  We have personalised the guidance to take into account the services we can offer at the practice.  Our protocols are all available for you to view on request. Please contact reception and ask for a copy if you are interested.

Annual NHS review/Quality and Outcomes Framework

Every year the NHS, inspects our practice and awards us points for the quality of our work. Last year we scored 990 out of a possible 1000.  We felt this a great achievement. In January 2007 and January 2008 we welcomed external assessors to Lockside who looked in detail at the quality of the services we provide. Click here to see their report summary.

You can take a closer look at our results at the official NHS Website

Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire

We have just received a report showing the results of the patient satisfaction questionnaire carried out by an independant organisation called CFEP-UK Surveys. If you took part in the survey we would like to thank you for the feedback. Overall we scored 81 % (compared to a National average of 61%) and so are very pleased with the results. Click here for a more detailed summary. As part of this questionnnaire patients were asked to comment on improvements they would like us to consider. To see all the comments made please click here.

Department of Health Access Survey - Your Doctor, your say

The Department of Health recently carried out a survey of how satisfied our patients were with the access they have to the practice. They received questionaires from 260 of our patients that had been randomly selected. We were very pleased with the results:

• 95% were satisfied with the phone access
• 89% felt they were able to get an appointment with a GP within 48 hours
• 92% felt they were able to book an appointment in advance if they wished to
• 94% were satisfied with our opening hours
• 89% find our receptionists very helpful
• 90% have confidence and trust in the doctor that they saw
• 99% are satisfied with the care they received

These results seem to be amongst the best in the country and we are really pleased. To see how we compare with other practices please follow this link. However we are always interested in improving the care or service we provide so please feel free to give us feedback by contacting the Practice Manager with any comments you may have.

Clinical Audit

At Lockside we have an annual cycle of practice audits to check that we are achieving the results we hope. We compare our results year-on-year so that improvements can be monitored. We also analyse new significant illness which may arise in our patients to see if there is anything more that could have been done to either prevent the illness or diagnose it more quickly.