The GP acts as a coordinator for a patient’s care and is very often the first point of contact for diagnosis. GPs retain overall responsibility for individual patient care within the surgery.

They work very closely with the rest of the clinical team to ensure patients’ are receiving the appropriate care and treatment, and review complex cases with them as needed.

GPs will very often call up for a range of tests to be undertaken by other team members or from external specialists e.g. hospital consultatnts. Care plans are agreed by a patient’s GP again working with other clinicians both inside the Practice as well as with community teams.

We operate a telephone triaging system which enables GPs to speak quickly with patients to determine what is needed; sometimes this may require patients’ to come in for a face to face appointment but very often things can be dealt with over the phone or the GP may refer the patients to another Practice if they provide the appropriate service.

GP Registrars are fully qualified doctors who are undertaking Royal College of General Practitioner training to become GPs. They undertake the same caseload as a GP but are supervised by an accredited training GP.

Petworth surgery is a training practice.

For more info: on Consultant Paramedic role and about Alex Walter our Consultant Paramedic

Practice Nurse Practice Nurses are experienced nurses who care for a huge variety of patients. Their work includes specialised and compression dressings, immunisations (child and adult), cervical screening, travel clinics, general treatment room duties, minor injuries. 

Some of them are highly skilled and have extensive specialist knowledge,  in the management of chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma and COPD.

They work seamlessly alongside the GPs and are able to quickly liaise with them when necessary.

Clinical Pharmacist: they undertake patient medication reviews and can deal with most queries relating to patients’ use of drugs and all aspects of medicines management.

They have extensive knowledge regarding complex medication regimes and can assist patients in optimising the number of drugs they are taking and can advise on a range of drug safety related issues.

Our clinical pharmacist also assist care and nursing home patients and work with our local Clinical Commissioning Group on medicines management issues.

The dispensary is a very important part of the surgery. Our dispeners  dispense acute and repeat medications / medical appliances to approx. 3000 patients registered with the practice. They manage and overview our Electronic prescibing requests, They work closley with our GP and nusres and Liase with local phamcaies.

Health Care Assistants have a number of skills and are trained to undertake a range of duties previously undertaken by nurses.

These include: taking ECG recordings, ear syringing, pre-clinic checks for diabetes and COPD, blood pressure recording, urine testing, removal of sutures and clips, dressings, compression dressings, doppler tests, administration of vaccinations and injection such as and flu, pneumonia and B12 injections. They can offer advice on diet and healthy living.

https://www.petworthsurgery.co.uk/online-services-3 

Phlebotomists can also help the nusres and health care Asssitants with easier procedures like taking someone blood  pressure or weight or help with urine samples.

Some may refer to them as receptionist but they are so much more than just a person who answers the phone.

The team work closely with the GP’s and will request full details regarding your problems to assist the GPs triage. All this will of course remain confidential. The team have been fully trained in confidentiality and GDPR. They have full access to medical notes which helps them signpost you to the relevant health care professional or third party organisation. For example if you call because you have a problem with your current medication they may book you a telephone appointment with our Clinical pharmacist rather than a doctor.

This also helps doctors prioritise house visits and phone calls to ensure that all patients receive the appropriate level of care.

The Patient Services team also deal with all incoming correspondence from our website, emails and mail, Liaise with other NHS service providers such as the Community Nurses or Onecall, they register new patients, assist the GPs issuing repeat medications, communicating with patients regarding their test results, they are involved with issuing invoices, dealing with medical insurance companies and taking payment for various non-NHS services and various different administrative tasks.