East Cliff Practice

Thank you for your review of the practice. I am sorry that you have not been contacted regarding your second Pfizer Vaccine. We are expecting a delivery of Pfizer second dose vaccines on Monday 10th May and we have clinics planned on the 12th-14th May so you should be contacted shortly and invited in. If you have not heard from us by Tuesday 11th May then please contact the surgery. The Covid vaccination programme has been the most challenging programme ever attempted by the NHS. The double vaccination of a population of more than 68 million people with very little planning, during the middle of a pandemic, has been extremely challenging. As you may be aware there have been national delays in the production and supply of vaccines and this has meant delays in us receiving vaccine doses. Often we receive late notice of the arrival and type of vaccine we receive making it difficult to plan clinics. In the case of next week’s delivery we were notified yesterday (4th May) of what vaccines to expect. We find that instead of receiving a limit of 1,000 vaccines which we had agreed to take each week, next weeks delivery will be close to 2,500 vaccines. The majority of which will need to be administered by Friday evening. This means having to ask staff to work longer hours in order to put on extra clinics and diverting staff to ensure no vaccines are wasted and all of this whilst running a busy GP surgery where daily demand is already above that which we were experiencing pre-covid. You ask why we are doing our ‘own thing?’ At the start of the vaccination programme there were no central sites. The only way to deploy so many vaccines in such a short space of time was to ask GP Practices to deliver the programme as collaborative groups of practices from existing surgeries. Across the country GP surgeries have vaccinated around 75% of the eligible population so far, it has been a huge effort. We had the choice, we could have said no and waited for the hubs to be set up but all of the staff here wanted to play our part in ending this dreadful blight on the nation. To date we have given more than 20,000 doses from the Montefiore Centre. The issue of being unable to book at the Saga site has nothing to do with East Cliff Practice. Government directives have stated that patients should have their first and second doses at the same site they have also set out which cohorts of patients should be vaccinated at which centres. We did have the option of joining the hub and centralising the vaccinations at the SAGA site in February but we had concerns over the ability of a central site to be able to manage such high numbers of patients and we are aware that for a proportion of our patients travel can be difficult and we wished therefore wanted to retain this as a local option. It is difficult to comment on the issue of younger people having had both vaccinations. If all sites are following the same rules then younger people who may have underlying conditions which might not be obvious may have had both vaccinations. I can assure you all staff here are doing their best through these challenging times,we aim to update our website at least monthly and are sorry that information on the website has not been updated as often as we would have liked. East Cliff Practice

Every GP has a catchment area that is agreed with the people who plan GP services (Kent and Medway CCG.) Catchment areas are put in place to ensure wherever people live they have access to a nearby doctor surgery. It is also the responsibility of Kent and Medway CCG to ensure that there are enough doctors in an area to care for the local population. Sadly there is a national shortage of doctors and unfortunately Thanet is amongst the highest under doctored areas in the country which means our doctors have much higher patient numbers than the rest of England which puts the doctors under continued pressure. A GP Practice needs to operate safely and to do that it needs to manage the number of patients it has. To use an analogy imagine a GP Practice is a bus. The bus has enough space for a certain number of passengers. If you overload the bus with more passengers than it is designed to carry then it becomes unsafe. The same is true of a GP Practice, we cannot continue to manage more patients than we have capacity for and therefore we need to manage our list size. If we had more doctors and the space to house them we would love to maintain the registration of patients who move a short distance outside of our catchment but sadly this is not possible at the moment. You can find information on local GP practices via the NHS Choices website www.nhs.uk. Should you have any difficulties you can contact Kent and Medway Clinical Commissioning Group by Telephone: 03000 424144 or via e-mail: eastkent.Primarycare@nhs.net who will be able to assist you in registering with a practice close to your new home. We wish you well at your new practice. East Cliff Practice

Thank you for your review of the practice. I am sorry that you are unhappy with the telephone triage we provide. Although we have offered telephone consultations for many years telephone triage was introduced initially for all patient queries last year in order to maintain a service through the pandemic. Although restrictions are being lifted there are still lockdown rules in place in many areas for public safety reasons. The very nature of the work we do means potentially poorly people who may have Covid are attending our surgery and we therefore need to maintain measures that protect patients and our own staff and for this reason we are only seeing patients who the clinician feels should be seen face to face. Furthermore this approach is likely to continue beyond the pandemic as NHS guidance expects GP Practices to increase the amount of remote consultations offered in the future. We have always continued to see patients face to face including during the height of the pandemic and clinicians will always see patients face to face when they feel it is clinically appropriate. I’m sorry that you believe the NHS is not fit for purpose. The staff here have worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic working longer hours and dealing with more patient contacts than we did pre pandemic. Our own staff have been ill with Covid as we accept the heightened risk of exposure in order to maintain a service and alongside that we have delivered the most flu vaccinations we have ever given in a year as well as provide almost 20,000 Covid vaccinations from the Montefiore centre to date and expect to continue doing so into the Autumn. East Cliff Practice

Thank you for your review and kind words which will be passed onto the staff within the surgery. Many thanks East Cliff Practice

Thank you for your review. Thanet has some of the highest patient to GP ratios due to a national shortage of doctors meaning there will always be high demand for appointments with a named doctor and unfortunately this is unlikely to change in the near future. We are pleased to see that you are happy with the service you receive in spite of this though. East Cliff Practice