DOCTORS and staff at Wellington Medical Centre struggling to cope with demand from 14,000 patients over the winter months are working on plans to improve the situation.

Britain’s leading doctor, Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, chairman of the Royal College of GPs Council, recently said she was ‘profoundly concerned’ about how doctors nationwide would cope over winter and warned that general practice was ‘skating on thin ice’.

Dr Sally di Mambro, GP partner at Wellington Medical Centre, said that reception staff may answer up to 550 calls a day and added: “‘Skating on thin ice’ certainly rings true when it comes to managing the number of calls and contacts made to staff at the medical centre over the winter months.

“Demand has risen sharply in General Practice across the country without the ability to match that demand with GP recruitment and with dwindling resources in real terms for provision of services, it is difficult to see how we will survive.

“All this paints a very black picture BUT we are still here and we have plans afoot at Wellington Medical Centre that we hope will stop us from falling through the ice.”

Dr di Mambro said the medical centre had been looking at strategies being employed across Somerset and nationally and was trying to pick the best parts of these to be used in Wellington.

She said the medical centre will be promoted as a place where a patient can be guided to an appropriate professional to deal with their problem. The extended team of professionals will include two Primary Care Practitioners who are paramedic trained,a Musculoskeletal Practitioner who is physiotherapy trained, two Pharmacist advisers and the existing team of Practice Nurses and General Practitioners.

The medical centre has been running a telephone triage system during a ‘crisis period’ while it considered its options, which had received mixed reviews. Now it is in the process of reorganising its appointment system to move away from telephone triage and is focusing on training reception staff to guide patients to the appropriate professional.

Dr di Mambro said: “For example, a query about medication may be better dealt with by one of our in-house pharmacy advisers rather than a GP, a shoulder pain may be better dealt with by our musculoskeletal practitioner from diagnosis through to management rather than involving the GP.

“There are also wide arrays of other community health services not affiliated to Wellington Medical Centre who can be contacted directly or to whom patients can be signposted.”

She added that eConsult will be available for use via the medical centre website within the foreseeable future. It will enable patients to manage minor problems themselves and signpost them to other services.

Dr di Mambro added: “We are hoping to move away from ‘thin ice’ and be more able to deal in a timely fashion with not just on-the-day urgent demand but also the chronic disease management and health promotion, which is where the true benefits of General Practice are borne out.

“We would like to thank our patients for bearing with us at the difficult time and hope we have made it clear that we are determined to survive and hope to improve our service against the odds.”