GP Video Script

Hello, I am Dr Navin Kumta, a GP Partner here at Ashford Medical Partnership.

I have had the privilege of being a GP, serving my local community, for more than 18 years now and I don’t think I have ever before experienced the sorts of pressure we are under now in General practice.

I know that affects all of you – our patients.

And the place that you feel that the most is in the 8am rush. It is a terrible telephone lottery with few winners. I am very sorry for the experiences many of you have trying to access our services.

Whilst we may never again have sufficient capacity to satisfy our total demand, we can and must do something to fix what we can.

In early July we are implementing a new system called Klinik. We believe it will help us eliminate the 8 am telephone lottery. There are two primary benefits I want to focus on:

It marks a shift to effective online access to our services as we become a ‘digital first’ practice, and,

It supports a consistent approach to clinical triage of patient need.

Once it is implemented, we would like to encourage patients to contact the Practice online via our website. And we will have Klinik online open from 7.30am until 430pm Mon- Friday.

We realise that not everyone has access online and we will still have a reduced capacity to handle telephone calls and in-person visits to our sites, but in both instances our care navigation team will take you through the same series of questions you would have answered if you had taken the online route. Please therefore can I request and encourage people to use online route wherever possible.

Once you send in your forms, the AI triage capability provided by Klinik which is overseen and supported by our GP-led clinical triage team will prioritise your care needs in a consistent and fair manner. This will help focus our efforts and resources based on needs. This is a dramatic shift from our first-come-first-served approach.

The clinical triage team will also be allocating patients who have been triaged to the most appropriate resource. This can be as part of our GP team or in the community. Our General practice have specialist non-GP clinical resources who are extremely skilled in their areas of expertise. Roles like Clinical pharmacist, first contact physiotherapists, nurses and nurse associates, advanced practitioners, paramedic practitioners, physician associates and health care associates have a vital role to play in delivering excellence in care. This will ensure that care needs are met by the right person.

You will be able to access our new Klinik system via our webpage. As well as providing a triage tool for urgent care needs, Klinik will enable you to request non-clinical services such as sick note requests, new patient registrations, medication enquiries or log test result requests.

You can learn more about Klinik, about some of our other services and the variety of clinical roles we have at Ashford Medical Partnership on our website.

This is the start of a journey to provide better access and a more responsive service to meet your needs. We hope it will end the 8am telephone lottery. We ask that you bear with us as we work through the inevitable initial teething problems, and we encourage all of you to choose digital-first access to Ashford Medical Partnership