Penryn Surgery's Story

Like many Practices, Penryn Surgery, which has a patient population of 19,500, were struggling to manage the volume of clinical correspondence coming into the Practice each week. They commissioned Practice Unbound’s Workflow training in May 2017.

What challenges were Penryn Surgery facing?

We worked with Penryn Surgery to understand their current process for managing clinical correspondence. We found that:

• The GP Surgery was using clerical and clinical resource inefficiently. Administrators had responsibility for scanning letters onto the system which were then forwarded to a GP to be actioned. This meant GPs had responsibility for all correspondence, including letters they did not need to see.
• The GP Surgery received on average 1,000 letters per week. As all the letters had to be seen by the GP, the Practice frequently had backlogs of clinical correspondence waiting to be actioned.
• On average, it took five days for letters to be uploaded onto the clinical system, unnecessarily delaying patients’ care.

How we helped

Through the implementation of Workflow, we worked with Penryn Surgery to:

• Import and understand our clinical system template, which improves the ease, efficiency and safety of Workflow
• Co-create a Workflow practice protocol to ensure Workflow is safe and clinically appropriate, whilst protecting the GP Surgery from increases in group indemnity premiums
• Support administrators to Workflow high frequency, low risk letters. By starting with these letter types, Penryn were able to release GP capacity within the first week of implementation.
• Support Administrators to move on to complete Workflow for more complex letter types

After Implementation

In the eight weeks after training Penryn Surgery, their Workflow team were confident in the new process and realising the benefits of Workflow which resulted in:

90% of clinical correspondence being processed through the Practice Unbound Workflow clinical template – saving 13.2 hours per week of GP time The number of days taken for correspondence to be processed reduced from 5 days 0.3 days, improving patients health journeys.

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