New website improves patient access
East Care Health GP Marie Burke.
The team at East Care Health have been making ongoing improvements over the past year on their journey to becoming a fully fledged Health Care Home.
A new website was launched in 2015, with support from Pegasus Health, East Care GP Marie Burke says. This has made it easier for patients to contact the practice, request prescriptions and enquire about appointments. “Many of our patients don’t have easy phone access. They receive our text message reminders about appointments but can’t easily make phone calls because of the cost,” Marie says.
For patients who do call the practice and want to speak to a nurse, the team has set up ‘phone call appointments’. “What used to happen was the nurses would get messages left on their voicemail and the difficulty was that you couldn’t triage the patients. You might have 10 non-urgent messages from one person and then the last message might be somebody with chest pain.”
“Now, if someone calls for a nurse, the receptionists put the patient’s name and urgency on a Medtech appointment template. The nurses check it regularly and then contact the patient. It gives them a much better way of managing their time. It’s worked very well in terms of relieving some of the pressure on the nurses and the patients understand it as well.”
East Care Health also has a new Care Coordinator, who has assisted in keeping acute and advanced care plans up-to-date. The Care Coordinator has also helped with accessing data on consultation numbers from Pegasus Health, which has led to the team making changes for their General Practitioners. “We’ve been working slightly differently to lighten the GP load,” Marie says. “Before, the default for patients would have been a GP appointment – now we can decide if that can be managed in another way.”
East Care Health has also added a voicemail prescription line that is checked regularly by nurses and is being well used by patients.
The team’s weekly clinical meeting between doctors and nurses has now expanded to include the practice manager, a local community pharmacist, administration staff and receptionists, Marie says. “We talk about practice news and clinical information. Sometimes we have external speakers come along, from organisations like St John and Child, Youth and Family.”
Marie says the team is planning to access data on its nursing work, to see if there are any tasks that would be better suited to administration staff.
Another major project is to move East Care’s patient management system to Pegasus Health’s Hosted Applications service. This will mean that GPs can log in from home or any remote location to access Medtech, rather than having to go into the clinic.