Is your GP surgery equipped for the digital future?

Doctors’ practices are becoming increasingly hi-tech in an effort to make a streamlined NHS more convenient for the public

55 per cent of practices already offer repeat prescriptions online

Appointments that you can make online, while still in your pyjamas. Repeat prescriptions that can be ordered in the same way. Secure access to your own medical records from your laptop. The option for a consultation over the internet via Skype. And, when you do need to pop into the doctor’s surgery in person, proper Wi-fi, so that you can download the latest podcasts about healthy living, browse consultant appointments on NHS Choices, and book them, too, before you go home.

The future of GP services is as much about accessibility for patients as freeing up doctors so they have more time to care, says Beverley Bryant, director of strategic systems and technology at NHS England. “We want the NHS to be easier to do business with, for ordinary citizens,” Bryant explains. “We want to improve accessibility and make people’s experiences better.”

So today and tomorrow, Bryant and her team will be at the NHS Health and Care Innovation Expo 2014 in Manchester, showcasing the possibilities of the next-generation surgery to GPs and their teams, helping doctors to understand and implement changes that could have a huge effect on all of us.

Her team will be on hand to help NHS staff make the changes that benefit the whole community, whether it’s taking the plunge into new systems that streamline referrals, or the online prescription service, something Bryant understands from a personal perspective.

“I have asthma,” she says. “I need inhalers every six months – but I only need to see a GP once every other year for my check-up. In between, I want to press a button on my PC and see repeat prescriptions happen automatically.”

Some GP practices are further down the modernisation path than others. When it comes to online appointments and repeat prescriptions, 55 per cent of practices already offer the services.

But patient records are not nearly as accessible. Only 1.6 per cent of practices offer this, says Bryant. “We want to increase that but the service has to be thought through. It is one thing logging into your records to see your medication history, or what allergies have been listed by your name, but we don’t want patients spotting a new test result has popped up and trying to decipher it before their own doctor has a chance to. Especially as the result might be complicated or serious. We don’t want to worry people.”

But she emphasises that all these new technologies are readily available – “and we want to use them, to bring the NHS up to same level of technical advancement as the rest of society”.

Anyone who attends the Expo is automatically enrolled in the “pop-up university”, a programme of healthcare lectures, workshops and seminars. Also making his debut will be EgBot, an engaging animated character that shows the new online world of health and care from the patient’s perspective.

There will also be a range of interactive sessions and presentations at the Dementia Café, whose informal coffee-shop setting replicates a countrywide campaign by the Alzheimer’s Society to offer advice and support for people affected by dementia in a social setting – namely, over a cuppa.

By meeting as many healthcare professionals as possible at events such as Expo 2014, Bryant and her team hope to make the NHS fitter for the future – and one that’s a better fit with patients’ increasingly online lives. “We have to look at it from a customer service perspective,” she says. “The NHS should be much easier to use – without it being a trauma.”

The Health and Care Innovation Expo 2014 runs today and tomorrow at the Manchester Central Convention Centre. For more details, visit healthcareinnovationexpo.com

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