Redundancies at Glenlyn Medical Centre

Last week, Monica met with the GP Partners at Glenlyn Medical Centre to discuss the recent reports that three GPs are being made redundant. They have promised to contact every patient about this decision and she hopes that will be done soon. 

Read Monica's follow-up letter to them below.

Dear Dr Strickland and Dr Kapoor

RE: Glenlyn Medical Centre

Thank you for taking the time to meet with me last week in response to local concern following your recent decision to make three GPs redundant. I was pleased to attend your practice with colleagues including Cllr Richard Flatau (Molesey East) and Cllr Caroline James (Thames Ditton). We all had received a good deal of correspondence from residents who were concerned by media reports about the changes in staffing.

As discussed, I have attached some of the issues that have been raised with me as you said you would be pleased to answer these directly as FAQs. If you can respond to me, I can then reply to those who wrote to me directly.

You offered that the communications relating to the redundancy decision could have been handled better. The first that most of your patients would have known about it would have been via the media. Moving forward, you committed to contacting every patient about staff changes to allay concerns.

You told us that the planned redundancies would not result in a reduction in GP sessions or practice capacity and that the same number of appointments were available.

You emphasized to us that there had been and would be no impact on patients because of the decision and that the services offered to them would not be affected. We talked about how you would measure this, and I would be grateful if you could detail this more fully.

You told me about the impact of the national Primary Care Plan and workforce plan and how Glenlyn’s innovations were in response to that - moving towards a clinician led rather than a GP led model of care - and also a response to the current challenges of funding in primary care.

I noted that other GP practices across the constituency are deploying different models of care - some because of GP-led innovations, others as a response to national policy and funding.

We talked about the communication around this and worries that patients may not be aware that they are not seeing a GP but another healthcare professional.

More widely, and not specific to Glenlyn, it seems to me that patients would benefit from greater clarity as to the clinician-led approach, the baseline they should expect from their practice - for example, GP: patient ratios, or the desirable mix of skills required to deliver the best patient outcomes - so they can reach a fuller understanding of what the model of care is at their particular practice. I will be seeking a meeting with Surrey Heartlands Integrated Care Board to follow up on this as well as several other issues that have emerged in my conversations with other surgeries.

We talked about access to appointments and the difficulties patients tell us they face in getting through to the practice and the nature of the appointment - who it is with and what form it takes. These difficulties are detailed in the attachment. You agreed to look at these issues. You said that the new telephone system was bedding down and improving.

Finally – and related to this – we talked about the poor patient satisfaction from your surveys over the years. You showed me recent data which you suggested showed that the patient satisfaction levels were improving.

I look forward to receiving your response to the questions I have attached and the further detail on the points above. I look forward to continuing the constructive dialogue we began last week.

Thank you again for your time in meeting me. I am copying this letter to Cllr Flatau and Cllr James.

Kind regards,
Monica Harding,
Parliamentary Candidate for Esher & Walton