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Rachel Tyler is a GP at Ocean Healthcare in Plymouth. Faced with their own GP recruitment crisis Rachel’s practice decided to merge and, at the same time, drastically alter the way they provided care to their patients; by splitting general practice into acute and chronic on different sites. In this podcast Rachel tells Ben how this worked in practice, how it impacted on GPs and about the introduction of new roles to support general practice.

Show Notes

Rachel describes the spiralling GP recruitment problems (1min 07secs)

The crisis comes to a head, despite their best efforts (2min 24secs)

Considering the decision to merge (3min 06secs)

Merging on its own may not be enough (4mins 13secs)

Merging plus radical change; the hot and cold split (5mins 04secs)

The split helps recruitment by making the workload more attractive (6mins 12secs)

The practicalities of the split and the introduction of new roles (6mins 57secs)

How the GPs work (8mins 30secs)

The skills of the nurse practitioners (9mins 32secs)

The skills and roles of the paramedics (10mins 12secs)

Training on the job – triage and support (11mins 10secs)

Introducing pharmacists and a pharmacy technician (12mins 02secs)

Pharmacists working across the hot and cold divide (13mins 03secs)

The impact on GP workload and stress levels (15mins 09secs)

Looking at admin pressures (15mins 58secs)

Innovative technology (16mins 25secs)

Patient and staff reaction (17mins 11secs)

Patient reaction to the non-GP roles (18mins 29secs)

The costs of the change (19mins 24secs)

One cost of the merger was on GP time… (20mins 31secs)

…and time to reassure staff (21mins 14secs)

The advisability of simultaneous merger and major change (21mins 32secs)