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Why the GP Patient Survey matters

Dr Julie Sharman, Medical Director with our GP and Practice Support Team, explains why practices should care about the GP Patient Survey and what actions they should take to follow-up on it.

By this point you may have forgotten about the annual Ipsos-Mori GP Patient Survey. After all, the data was collected between January and March, but the results weren’t released until last month. Or perhaps you haven’t forgotten, but you may have dismissed the survey as unfair and irrelevant. Regardless of your feelings about the survey, it is important and how you act on your practice’s survey results does impact on your CQC evaluation and several other “Quality” assessments. And if you are a PMS practice, under the service line “Patient Voice” there will be a contractual requirement for you to improve on your results for specific survey questions. Now is the time to look into your results and make a plan for managing them.

First, let’s do a quick overview of the GP Patient Survey: the survey is sent to over a million people across the UK by an independent research agency. The point of the survey is to give patients the opportunity to feedback about their experiences with local NHS services and for individual GP practices to see how they stack up against similar practices. We know that London consistently has the lowest-ranked patient satisfaction across England. There are likely many reasons for this, and it does not include London GPs being inadequate. Don’t be disheartened if some of the responses are less positive than you anticipate, we all know that it is the patients who have a complaint that are likely those who spend time completing feedback like this.

Follow these suggestions to successfully assess and improve on your GP Patient Survey results.

Suggestions:

1. First things first, go to the GP Patient Survey website and check your practice’s results: https://gp-patient.co.uk/practices-search
2. Spend some time looking at what your practice could improve on, and how it compares to the CCG average and the national average and last year’s results. It is well-worth celebrating the items that your practice has performed well on, to maintain the morale of your busy staff.
3. Check what Patient Voice indicators are in your PMS contract, and focus on making an action plan for those.
4. Next, get your Patient Participation Group involved. Patient engagement is integral to high quality care, and this group is likely to have both innovative ideas for improving problems, and the time and motivation to raise awareness in the community. See our patient engagement document for more details.
5. Start working on this plan sooner rather than later. Remember, the survey results were released after significant lag time, meaning that you only have approximately 6 months, rather than a year to make these improvements.

As ever, if you are feeling stuck and would like some support, get in touch with our GP and Practice Support team by emailing GPSupport@lmc.org.uk. You can also contact your individual sector team; the details of Committee Liaison Executives can be found here.

Last updated : 20 Sep 2017

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