All patients registered at the Wansford & Kings Cliffe Practice have a named doctor who has overall responsibility for your care and support. Your registered GP is also your named accountable and your allocated GP. Your allocated GP will be responsible for the provision of your healthcare. If you choose to see another doctor at the surgery, you are entirely free to go on doing so exactly as before.

If you are unsure of who is your named Doctor please ask at reception.

New patients are allocated a Doctor on Registration.

It is helpful to know if you have a Carer (someone who takes on an unpaid caring role) or if you are a Carer for someone else. We have an established Carer’s policy and a Carer’s information pack available from Reception. We also have a page dedicated to Carers on this website.

This organisation is committed to providing a safe, comfortable environment where patients and staff can be confident that best practice is being followed at all times and the safety of everyone is of paramount importance.

All patients are entitled to have a chaperone present for any consultation, examination or procedure where they feel one is required. The chaperone may be a family member or friend. On occasions you may prefer a formal chaperone to be present i.e. a trained member of staff.

Wherever possible we would ask you to make this request at the time of booking your appointment so that arrangements can be made, and your appointment is not delayed in any way. Where this is not possible, we will endeavour to provide a formal chaperone at the time of request. However, it may be necessary to re-schedule your appointment.

Your healthcare professional may also require a chaperone to be present for certain consultations in accordance with our Chaperone Policy.

If you would like to see a copy of our Chaperone Policy or have any questions or comments regarding this, please contact the Practice Manager.

Identity

Empowering Wansford and Kings Cliffe practice to transition to environmentally sustainable healthcare

Aims

• To enable Wansford Health Hub to act on the climate and ecological emergency as it affects our work, patients, stakeholders and staff
• To provide a useful hub of information and resources
• To support the development of our people and practice with committed aims and support the wider community.
• To develop effective actions towards environmentally sustainable practice enabling transition to a net zero carbon general practice
• To collaborate with other organisations engaged with our aims (such as offering education, coaching, leadership or collaboration on research and evaluation)

Values

• We aim to enthuse and engage Wansford and Kings Cliffe community in action towards environmentally sustainable healthcare
• We create inclusive, supportive, respect, honest, collaborative and creative environments to support our aims
• We welcome a diversity of thoughts and opinions in helping us develop as a community and to achieve our aims. We recognise that this best achieved through a compassionate, respectful and non-judgemental approach to communication with each other and the wide primary care community
• We support each other to develop our leadership abilities

Your care may at times be provided by several health and care professionals from one or more organisations through an MDT (multi-disciplinary team) in which they will come together to discuss how best to care for you. Information will need to be shared between them so that they have the information they need to provide you with the best care. There is a legal duty on organisations to share your information for your individual care where it is lawful to do so, unless you object.

All organisations involved in the MDT have a duty to ensure your information is used and shared safely. These organisations must make information easily available to you (e.g. on their websites and in privacy notices) that explains how your information may be used, why this is lawful and what rights you have to object. If you are unsure what information is being shared about you, or someone you are responsible for, you can ask health and care organisations to explain this.

Summary Care Records on the NHS Digital website.

All registered patients have the right to express a preference to receive services from a particular Doctor, either generally or in relation to any particular condition; such preferences will be recorded by the Practice.

The Practice will endeavour  to comply with any reasonable preference but need not do so if the preferred performer has reasonable grounds for refusing to provide services to the patient or if the performer does not routinely perform the services in question within the Practice.

Patient who fail to attend their booked appointments

If you fail to attend 3 appointments within the same 12-month period, we will consider removing you from our list.  Failure to attend an appointment result in other patients having to wait longer for an appointment.  We request that if you cannot attend, you let us know even at short notice.  We can always re-fill an appointment.

We aim to provide our patients with the highest possible standards of medical care and to treat our patients with dignity and respect.

We are a very busy practice, and our patients can help us by using our services appropriately.  Keeping or cancelling appointments helps us and other patients.  Many hours of doctors’ time are wasted by patients who fail to attend without cancelling and this means other patients cannot be seen or may have to wait longer.

We also expect patients to treat our staff with courtesy and respect. We have a zero-tolerance policy towards aggressive behaviour and patients who are rude, abusive or aggressive may be removed from the practice list and have to register elsewhere.

Our Privacy Notices explains what information we collect about you, how we store this information, how long we retain it and with whom and for which legal purpose we may share it, the documents can be downloaded here:

• COVID-19 Privacy Notice
• Patient Privacy Notice
• Subject Access Request Policy
• Data Protection Policy

Prescribing Policy for patients travelling abroad for short and long periods of time.

Disclaimer: NHS England requires that the net earnings of doctors engaged in the practice is publicised, and the required disclosure is shown below. However, it should be noted that the prescribed method for calculating earnings is potentially misleading because it takes no account of how much time doctors spend working in the practice and should not be used to form any judgement about GP earnings, or to make any comparison with any other practice.

All GP practices are required to declare the mean earnings (e.g. average pay) for GPs working to deliver NHS services to patients at each practice.

The average pay for GPs working in Wansford Surgery during the year ended 30th June 2022 was £63,406 before tax and national insurance. This is for 0 full time GPs, 4 part time GPs and 0 locum GP who worked in the practice for more than 6 months.

Click here to view full policy

Your GP practice holds copies of your patient health record electronically and in paper format. Both contain the healthcare information about you that your GP needs including your medical history, medications, allergies, immunisations and vaccinations.

If you have previously registered with a different GP in England, upon registering at this practice your electronic health record will, where possible, be transferred automatically from your previous practice through the use of an NHS system called GP2GP.

Transferring Your Electronic Health Record leaflet.

The Practice takes it very seriously if a member of staff or one of the doctors or nursing team is treated in an abusive or violent way.

The Practice supports the government’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ campaign for Health Service Staff. This states that GPs and their staff have a right to care for others without fear of being attacked or abused. To successfully provide these services a mutual respect between all the staff and patients has to be in place. All our staff aim to be polite, helpful, and sensitive to all patients’ individual needs and circumstances. They would respectfully remind patients that very often staff could be confronted with a multitude of varying and sometimes difficult tasks and situations, all at the same time. The staff understand that ill patients do not always act in a reasonable manner and will take this into consideration when trying to deal with a misunderstanding or complaint.

However, aggressive behaviour, be it violent or verbally abusive, will not be tolerated and may result in you being removed from the Practice list and, in extreme cases, the Police being contacted.

In order for the practice to maintain good relations with their patients the practice would like to ask all its patients to read and take note of the occasional types of behaviour that would be found unacceptable:

• Using bad language or swearing at practice staff
• Any nonphysical assault including shouting, using inappropriate words or behaviour causing distress and or constituting harassment
• Any physical violence towards any member of the Primary Health Care Team or other patients, such as pushing or shoving
• Verbal abuse towards the staff in any form including verbally insulting the staff
• Racial abuse, discriminatory remarks and sexual harassment will not be tolerated within this practice
• Persistent or unrealistic demands that cause stress to staff will not be accepted. Requests will be met wherever possible, and explanations given when they cannot
• Causing damage or stealing from the Practice’s premises, staff or patients
• Obtaining drugs and or medical services fraudulently
• We ask you to treat your GPs and their staff courteously at all times.

Removal from the practice list

A good patient doctor relationship, based on mutual respect and trust, is the cornerstone of good patient care. The removal of patients from our list is an exceptional and rare event and is a last resort in an impaired patient practice relationship. When trust has irretrievably broken down, it is in the patient’s interest, just as much as that of the practice, that they should find a new practice. An exception to this is on immediate removal on the grounds of violence, for example when the Police are involved.

Removing other members of the household

In rare cases, however, because of the possible need to visit patients at home it may be necessary to terminate responsibility for other members of the family or the entire household. The prospect of visiting patients where a relative who is no longer a patient of the practice by virtue of their unacceptable behaviour resides, or being regularly confronted by the removed patient, may make it impossible for the practice to continue to look after the whole family. This is particularly likely where the patient has been removed because of violence or threatening behaviour and keeping the other family members could put doctors or their staff at risk.