Oct. 6, 2026

Agenda

Minutes of a PPG meeting held at

Medwyn Centre on October 6, 2026

Attendees:-

A Maybanks, Chairman

O Forbes

A Heaps

J Giles

C Luck

T McWilliam

J Morey

J Partridge

C Peters

Dr Louise Tomey

Apologies for Absence

None

The Minutes of the Last Meeting were approved and signed without amendment.

Matters Arising It was suggested that new participants for the PPG could be recruited via the Medwyn Facebook newsletter, since those who had already signed up had been lost with a corrupted file. Previous newsletters had been written by Nan Nobes, with copies available online and in the waiting room.

Practice update from Charlotte Luck, Practice Business Manager

Flu campaign

Firstly, our autumn vaccination programme is now well underway. We had more than 1,400 patients through the doors on Saturday 3 October, and the clinic ran extremely well. A huge thank you to all of the staff and volunteers who supported us on the day — we really couldn’t run clinics of that size without that help. Over 1200 flu vaccines and almost 500 covid vaccinations completed since 1 October.

We have another 600 patients booked for Saturday 10 October with a further 400 currently scheduled for Saturday 24 October. Patients who are eligible are still able to book in, so there is still availability for anyone who has not yet arranged their vaccination.

EMMA telephone system

We are very aware that there has been quite a lot of negative publicity and some understandable concern from patients.

We are monitoring the system closely rather than simply relying on how it is supposed to work. We review the call data, look at individual calls where things have not gone well, and feed those examples back so that improvements can be made. We are also meeting with the EMMA team every few weeks to review performance and discuss any issues that we or our patients have identified.

The statistics we are seeing now show that the system is working considerably better than it was when it was first introduced, although we recognise that there are still occasions where the experience is not as good as we would want it to be.

Since mid September Dr Adkin has recorded an introductory message which explains to patients why we have introduced EMMA and what we are hoping the system will achieve. We hope this will give patients a little more context when they telephone the practice and still encourage those that can complete the online form to do so instead of calling in so that we can preserve the phone lines for those that cannot use online or for are more vulnerable patients.

We will continue to monitor EMMA closely and use patient feedback to help us identify where further improvements are needed.

We are introducing a new Reception Supervisor role within the practice. This will give our reception team an additional day-to-day point of contact within the surgery and provide more immediate support when queries or difficult situations arise.

The aim is to strengthen the support available to the reception team and, ultimately, help us provide a better and more consistent experience for patients.

We are on a big recruitment drive for reception staff and will be trialling a new method of training which we hope will settle staff in earlier.

As always, we are very happy to hear feedback from the PPG, particularly around patients’ experiences of the telephone system and the vaccination clinics.

Accurx Scribe

We have started using Accurx Scribe in some consultations at the practice.

Accurx Scribe is a secure digital tool that helps clinicians document consultations more efficiently. It listens during the consultation and produces a written draft of the discussion for the clinician to review and amend before anything is added to the patient record.

It does not create an audio recording for future playback.

The aim is to reduce the amount of time clinicians spend typing during appointments, allowing them to focus more fully on the patient and the conversation taking place.

Patients will be informed when Scribe is being used, and clinicians remain responsible for checking and approving the final consultation note.

Diabetes patients

Dr Sekhon has been focussing on diabetic patients to review their medications proactively.

Health care assistants.Have been affected by staff sickness and there has been an unsuccessful attempt to recruit a replacement HCA for several months. A recent HCA has now been appointed – an internal candidate from our reception team. Six weeks transition and then we would expect to see a reduction in length of wait for blood test. Urgent blood tests can be completed sooner. We are going to be training up one of our reception staff to be able to complete blood test appointments, which means we will have cover should a HCA be unwell and also developing them for the future.

Nursing team

Additional diabetes and respiratory specialist prescribing nurse joined the team in August working full time with us, she has been a great addition, giving additional support with a nurse going on maternity leave and built in for succession planning.

Extra GP cover

Dr Becky Fenwick returns from maternity leave- phased return- first day back is Thursday 8 October.

We have secured using Dr Srikanathan and Dr Richards until 31 March which is an average of 6 sessions, or 3 days a week- almost an additional 2400 appointments

Routine appointments available next day – urgent care still sees who they need on the day

Five new staff from DHC

Care coordinators and Clinical Pharmacists now employed by Medwyn with effect from 1 October

Space remains a challenge at the practice

In January/ February hoping to have new clinical rooms created on the second floor, meaning administration teams can move to third floor. Will create more capacity for clinicians- need to balance budget of course- however, will be easier to accommodate additional staff including staff from the Primary Care Network

We had been planning on the move October/ November however contracts issues within the wider NHS have prohibited this from happening.

The plan is for three more consulting rooms on the second floor, two physiotherapy rooms (one large enough to accommodate a small gym)

NHS App notifications

We would encourage patients who use the NHS App to make sure that notifications are switched on.

As part of our efforts to reduce unnecessary costs to the NHS, our default method for sending some patient messages is through the NHS App. If the message has not been read within 45 minutes, it will then automatically be sent as a text message instead.

Sending messages through the NHS App is considerably cheaper than sending SMS text messages, so the more patients who are able to receive and read messages through the App, the more we can reduce avoidable messaging costs.

We would therefore be very grateful if patients could check that their NHS App notifications are enabled and, where possible, use the App to view

System for identification of neurodiverse individuals within the practice

This was raised by Jenny Partridge, who had experienced someone with problems who had not been identified before having an endoscopy at the Royal Surrey Hospital. Dr Tomei reported that most Medwyn patients with similar problems had been identified. Many of those with ADHD cope well. Notifications were passed on up the line.

Any Other Business