Elm Tree Medical Centre

Not Enough Funding. NOT Enough Time. Not Enough Of Us. A patient asked me recently why she now has to go to the pharmacy for something we would have sorted in the surgery in ten minutes. Fair question. The honest answer takes longer than she had. General practice has been saying the same thing for years. There are not enough of us, and not enough funding, to keep absorbing everything that lands on us. That was true when we started saying it and it is still true now. The response has been to move some of that work out into the community. Pharmacies taking on more. Other providers picking up services that used to sit with practices. On paper that is sensible, and some of it genuinely does help patients. What is harder to sit with is watching funding follow the work out of general practice, sometimes at rates we were never offered to do the same job, while the workload left behind has not got any lighter. I do not think colleagues are wrong to feel uneasy about that. I feel it too. Where I have landed is that this should not be an argument about who owns which piece of work. The thing that keeps happening is that decisions get made about primary care rather than with it. Nobody is ringing round to ask the people opening the doors at half seven what would actually make a difference. If a pharmacy colleague can see someone faster than I can, that is good for the patient and I will say so happily. Community pharmacy has been undervalued for a long time. What I would like is for the same conversation to include an honest look at what general practice is still carrying, what it costs to carry it, and whether the funding reflects any of that. There is one patient at the end of all of this. They are not interested in whose budget they came out of. They just want to be seen.

💙 Feedback Friday 💙 Every kind word reminds us why compassionate, patient-centred care matters. A big thank you to our dedicated team for consistently taking the time to listen, explain, and support our patients throughout their healthcare journey. If you've recently visited Elm Tree Medical Centre, we'd love to hear about your experience. Leave us a review here: 🔗 https://lnkd.in/enD7keFF

My Dad Has One Rule... from the day we took over the practice. Anyone who comes through that door gets seen. No exceptions. I thought it was a lovely idea. I also thought it was completely unworkable. We had around 4,000 patients then, and my brothers were getting through 50, 60 people a day. There is no version of "everyone gets seen" that survives a day like that, not with the staff we had. So we started asking a different question. What would this practice have to look like for that rule to actually hold? That is where the hub room came from. The three of us in one room, triaging over the phone, pulling patients in the same day when they needed it. It meant hiring well ahead of the growth, which dropped our income by about 30% in the first year. That was an uncomfortable year to sit through. The thing my dad understood, and I didn't at first, was that access is the entire product. Ask anyone on the street what they find hard about general practice and you get the same sentence back. I can't get in. I ring at eight, I'm nineteenth in the queue, and by the time someone answers there is nothing left. We simply stopped doing that. Patients started telling their friends they could ring up and actually be seen. Word did the rest of the work for us. We are now over 18,000 patients, 4.9 stars from more than 1,200 Google reviews, and our stress levels are lower than when we were a quarter of the size. None of that started as a growth strategy. It started with a man who is first in at half seven, last out at eight, and who genuinely does not want anyone to know that.

🌟 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐬 𝐔𝐬! 🌟 We're delighted to share the latest GP Patient Survey results, reflecting the trust and confidence our patients place in 𝑬𝒍𝒎 𝑻𝒓𝒆𝒆 𝑺𝒖𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒓𝒚. 💙 91% reported a good overall experience. 📞 94% found it easy to contact us by phone. 💻 96% found it easy to contact us through our website. 🤝 96% praised the helpfulness of our reception and administrative team. 📋 94% knew what the next step would be after contacting us. ⏱️ 99% knew their next step within two days of contacting the practice. A heartfelt thank you to all our patients who took the time to complete the survey. Your feedback helps us continue to improve and provide the highest standard of care to our community. We remain committed to delivering accessible, compassionate, and patient-centred healthcare every day. NHS England Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council #elmtreemedicalcentre

"We Have No Competitors!" Founders say that to me like it is the best news they could possibly bring. I never hear it that way. If genuinely nobody else is doing what you are doing, there are really only two explanations. Either you have spotted something the rest of the market has missed, or the rest of the market looked at the same problem and decided it was not worth solving. The second one is far more common than founders want to believe. I have sat with people who really were ahead of everyone else. It happens. I have sat with many more who had built something clinicians did not recognise as a problem, or had already worked around years ago, or would never put in their top twenty priorities on a Monday morning. No competition is not automatic proof of a gap in the market. So before you celebrate being the only one in the space, ask yourself an uncomfortable question. Has anyone you are building for told you, unprompted and in their own words, that this is the thing keeping them up at night? Not in a survey but actually in a conversation. Competition is irritating. It is also evidence that somebody, somewhere, is already paying to have this problem solved. If you have no competitors, find out why before you raise money on it.

Doc, How Can I Tranform Healthcare With AI? My inbox is full of people who want to transform healthcare with AI. About half of them have never worked a day inside the NHS. I get these messages every week. AI developers, health-tech founders, consultants. All wanting an introductory call, all convinced they have built something that will change how general practice works. My first question is always the same. Have you actually worked in healthcare? Have you spent time inside an NHS organisation? Not read about it. Worked in it. Most of the time the answer is no. I understand the excitement. Healthcare is a huge market and AI is genuinely going to change parts of it. I am not dismissing that. However, if you do not understand how a GP practice actually runs on a Monday morning, how commissioning works, how clinicians think, what the real constraints are, then your product is probably solving a problem you imagined rather than one we have. The NHS is not a tech company with patients attached. It has decades of culture, regulation, funding structures and clinical workflows you cannot shortcut by reading a few papers. So if you are building for the NHS and wondering why clinicians will not take your call, that is the honest answer. We have heard the pitch before, from people who did not understand the building they were walking into. Get the background first. Spend real time inside the system. Then lets have a chat :) You will find the conversation goes very differently.

Stroke Association Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council #elmtreemedicalcentre

𝐇𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐄𝐥𝐦 𝐓𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐞! A new week means new opportunities to take care of yourself and those you love. Whether you need advice, support, or medical care, our friendly team is here to help you every step of the way. Wishing you a healthy, happy, and positive week ahead! 💚 NHS England #elmtreemedicalcentre

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NHS England #elmtreemedicalcentre