Patient Feedback survey 2024

Thank you to those who took the time to fill out our survey earlier this year. We appreciate your feedback, and wanted to respond in turn.

What we learnt from the survey

The survey highlighted the following areas where our patients feel we are performing better than the national average across general practice:

• Interpersonal Skills of clinical staff – including:
  • Clinical team being caring, listening to the patients, and respecting them and giving them the information required;
  • Privacy and confidentiality, and;
  • the practice is clean and tidy.

From your comments, we learnt that many of you feel we are providing a high standard of care, are compassionate and caring, and provide a personalised level of care. Additional to that, many feel we do try to accommodate requests for urgent appointments, or seeing patients as quickly as possible.

We have also identified areas from your feedback which we will endeavour to improve upon. This is based on average scores where we did not perform as well as we would have liked. This data was in answer to the following questions: running on time, able to see a doctor quickly when needed, and the ease with which you can make an appointment on a date and time which suits you. We also note very helpful feedback in your comments which support the above.

How we can improve

To address these issues we will be doing the following:

• Providing estimated wait time to patients when the patient arrives (or phones to check progress).
• Increase the number of appointments reserved for “on the day” in our diary
• We are looking at opening up some “on the week appointments” reserved once or twice a week, enabling semi urgent access to your doctors
• Urgent patient appointments (emergency) – we are working on changing our system of responding to these. We will have the Receptionist pass the call onto one of our Nurses, who will triage the patient via phone. The Nurse will discuss the symptoms with a GP, before asking the patient to come to the surgery – if required. This may mean that the patient goes straight to hospital, or can wait until later in the day, or even the following day to see a doctor.
• We will also be updating our website so you can see when your usual doctor is due to be working. However, as many of us have young families and do work part time, we encourage you to have a couple of doctors at the practice with whom you feel comfortable, to improve access to care.

Additionally we encourage you:

• Book a follow up appointment as you leave your appointment, if possible.
• If you have a chronic health conditions, you are most likely eligible for a GP Management Plan with two reviews each calendar year. The plan and reviews are  bulk-billed and  involve seeing both the nurse and GP to look at your health status and  goals, ensuring that everything is in place to manage your chronic condition and general health. For those eligible, we strongly encourage that you take up the offer of a GP management plan, thereby optimising your health outcomes.
• As you know, sometimes we do run late, as it can be hard to predict how complex a presentation will be, and because we do not want to rush patients or our medicine. With this in mind, please feel free to call ahead and find out if your doctor is running late before your appointment.
• To help us avoid running late, please make a longer appointment if you have more than one issue to discuss with your doctor. Time speeds up when you are in the consulting room, whilst it drags while you are waiting. If you think you need longer it is best to book a long appointment. If you don’t use the time, you won’t be charged for it.

Interestingly within your comments, many of you have noted systemic issues within the primary health care system of Medicare in Australia:

• We encourage you to talk to your local MP’s about this.
• From our perspective, we are writing to our local MP’s and Dr Helen Roxburgh has met with our local members and the Federal Health Minister to explain the issues.
• We are members of the RACGP, which is lobbying and advocating for primary health care funding and medicare reform.
• We will continue to advocate for change which benefits you – our patients.

Once again, thank you for your ongoing support and trust in Belair Medical. As always, you can call our Practice Manager, should you have concerns regarding our service, or suggestions for improvement.