The Cardiff and Vale Summariser Bank
11 December 2018
An overlooked but important workload issue affecting surgeries comes from new patient registrations and the summarising of their clinical notes onto the practice computer system. Practice closures and mergers can lead to increased numbers of patients registering in GP practices. The upcoming LDP will lead to even more registrations which can quickly overload an admin department. Not having up to date clinical records can lead to unacceptable clinical risks for clinicians and loss of funding for the practice through inaccurate disease registers.
To help with these pressures, the General Practice Support Team (GPST) have been gathering a bank of trained summarisers from local practices, who may have staff with additional hours outside of their normal working week. These summarisers could then offer these additional hours to provide work for other surgeries in Cardiff and Vale. To bolster these numbers we looked at training local medical students to provide ad hoc summarising sessions for surgeries.
On the 14th of September we provided training for 24 3rd year Medical Students (predominantly form the Cardiff University GP Society GPSOC). To date, 19 of these students are happy to be contacted to provide summarising for Cardiff and Vale Surgeries.
You will need to be mindful of providing some simple training on how your computers are set up, provide protocols that you may have, and explain how notes storage is managed.
If you are a Cardiff and Vale practice and would like to contact anyone off this bank list of summarisers please contact CAV.GP@wales.nhs.uk
The salary and hours are to be negotiated between individual surgeries and summarisers.
