W-O-T Surgery - Who is Who and Who Does What?

 

BACK TO HOME

 

We know we have been really busy and short staffed in recent months, which in turn, has sometimes caused frustrations and made it difficult for you to make an appointment as easily as we would all like. This is a national problem but listening to feedback from our patients and our staff, we have been addressing this by working hard on recruiting new doctors and investing in developing new roles to support our clinical team.

We realise this can be confusing, so here is an attempt to provide a simple guide.

 

Our GP Team:

Our practice keeps growing steadily and we continue to expand our GP team.  This autumn we welcome to our team, Dr Marriott and Dr Parry who are both very experienced GPs.  Dr Barnsley has returned from maternity leave and is continuing her GP training with us. We congratulate Dr Argyle (baby girl) and Dr Saunders (baby boy) on the birth of their babies over the summer.

 

Our Urgent Care Team:

Every morning and afternoon, a different one of our GPs takes on the Duty Doctor role, carrying out urgent telephone consultations and seeing patients that need an urgent same-day appointment.

They also respond to urgent e-consults and urgent prescribing issues, such as changes to drug charts for terminally ill patients.

The Duty Doctor is supported by one of our fantastic Advanced Nurse Practitioners- Hayley Ford and Sarah Bush and Jo Whitrow, our Urgent Care Practitioner. Jo has previously worked as a paramedic and also works in the walk-in centre in south Bristol. 

 

Our Nursing Team:

Our wonderful Practice Nurses (Clare Brice-Taylor, Gemma Jones, Charlotte Overfield, Annette Thomas) support our patients in several ways including chronic disease management, administration of vaccinations, cervical screenings, wound management and more!

We welcome a new nurse to our team this week: Tamsin Peregrine-Morgan.

Izzy Bassett, Sue Elliott-Smith, and Dolly Jordan are our Healthcare Assistants and a key part of the nursing team. They take blood tests, perform ECGs and NHS Health Checks, and assist with contraceptive coils, implants, and dressings.

 

Our Prescription Team:

Comprises of Prescription Clerks and Pharmacists:

Georgia Pearce leads our Prescription Clerk team who work every day to improve your experience when you order a prescription and help iron out any difficulties with prescription requests and repeat prescribing.  

They also pick up changes made to medication when a person is discharged from hospital.

Our Practice Pharmacists:

Isabel Martinez and Shireen Wong work closely with our GP and nursing teams and carry out consultations on the phone and face to face about prescribing issues, such as blood pressure medication, cholesterol management, heart failure, vitamin D and B12.

They also carry out our 3-month and 12-month HRT reviews.

They have special structured medication review appointments to help patients who take a lot of different medications and need help understanding and managing it all. 

 

Our Patient Support Team:

Romany Freeman, our Care Coordinator, has been supporting our more frail and elderly patients, those with dementia and those needing palliative care. She also helps our nursing home patients. We now also have a First Contact Physio, Josh Wells, and a Mental Health Practitioner, Julia Corben, who can help patients directly without having to go through a GP first.

 

Our Care Navigator Team:

Georgia Pearce also leads our team of incredible, patient, and hardworking Care Navigators. They are our first point of contact at the front desk in the waiting room, on our phone lines and in managing e-consults.

Their role in finding out what a patient is calling for and how urgent it is, is essential in navigating to the most suitable appointment.  

In response to long waits on the phone, we have introduced a new telephone system recently.

We’ve also changed our online e-consultation provider which is proving popular too. This can be accessed via our website. You’ll find a wealth of information on the website. We also have a Facebook page which sends our regular updates about surgery news.

 

Our Practice Secretaries:

Process our patient referrals and help liaise with District Nurses and hospitals.  They also help organise patient reports and requests for private forms.

 

Our Workflow Team:

Our Workflow team carefully review all the hospital letters that come to us from every outpatient appointment, hospital discharge and 111 contact. They ensure our GPs are informed about any new cancer cases, any vulnerable patients or anyone that needs to be highlighted.

 

Our Research Team:

Thank you so much to all our patients who take part in our research projects. Our research nurse Charlotte Overfield works with Dr Jenny Eachus and Catherine Farrington, to keep us at the forefront of primary care research by introducing the practice to new research projects which we carry out jointly with different universities. 
Currently, we are working on 8 projects:

  • TIGER (eczema and food allergies in children) 
  • ATHENA (Shingles, can we prevent nasty post shingles pain?)
  • ERICA (how can we pick up cancers earlier?)
  • Antidepressant withdrawal (how best to help people come off antidepressants when they are ready)
  • CHIP (Housebound patients and covid 19)
  • ATTACK (kidney health and aspirin)
  • Dare2think (Atrial Fibrillation and when to start blood thinners)
  • MySMILE (can good dental health slow down memory loss?)
 

Teaching and Training:

We are a University of Bristol teaching practice, and our GPs currently teach 4th and 5th year student doctors. We also welcome Ellie, a student nurse who is with us for a 10 week placement. Dr Amy Davies is our GP trainer and helps qualified doctors through their 3 year GP training programs.

 

Our Management Team:

Help pull all the teams together and makes things work! Catherine Farrington is our practice manager. She has built a strong management team around her over the past 6 months, and we congratulate the following existing staff members as they take up their new roles in the practice:

  • Cheryl Jenkins – Estates, Facilities and HR Manager
  • Stephanie McNally – Business, Finance and Administration Manager
  • Georgia Pearce – Reception, Prescriptions and Qualities Manager.