Partnership Update:

We sadly say goodbye at the end of March to two of our GP partners, Dr Sarah Breese, and Dr Alex Cameron.

Dr Breese with us at the practice since 2012 and Dr Cameron since 2019.

We thank them for their service, dedication and commitment to our practice and patients in the time they’ve been with us, they will both be deeply missed by us all.

We are very pleased to let you know that we have successfully recruited a new GP to the practice, Dr Raman Rao will be joining us from April as a full time GP. Dr Rao comes with a wealth of experience and is very much looking forward to getting started at the practice and getting to know our practice team and patients.

We are also welcoming two of our longstanding practice team members to the practice partnership.

Juliet Sagar, Practice Manager and Tony Hewett, Practice Pharmacist will also be joining the practice partnership from April. Juliet has been with the practice since 2008 and Tony since 2016.

We wish all of our new partners every success in their new roles.

Training Placement Update:

We welcomed our new GP Registrar, Dr May Paing, to the practice on Monday 19^th February.

GP registrars are doctors training to become GPs.  Llanfyllin Group Practice is accredited as a GP Training Practice, GP registrars are attached to one of the doctors here at the practice who is their trainer. The GP registrar is a fully qualified doctor who is likely to have a lot of experience of hospital medicine. 

Each GP Registrar will remain with us for a period of 6-12 months, so you may therefore be offered an appointment with the GP registrar. By the time you see a GP registrar they will have spent at least 5 years at medical school to qualify as a doctor. They will have then done 2 years working in hospitals followed by a 3 year training programme to become a GP, during which they will spend 18 months in a training practice. So by the time you see this doctor they may well have been working as a doctor for a period of up to 4 years.

Please keep an eye on our Website and Facebook page for our latest recruitment opportunities.

Important Medication Ordering Update:

We recently completed a review of our dispensary service at the practice to ensure we are providing a safe, effective and timely service to our patients. You may be aware from the communications the practice puts out to patients that it has become increasingly challenging for dispensing practices to provide a timely service with the many and increasing stock shortages we are experiencing and more recently delivery issues impacting on our service.

As a part of our review, we needed to look at safety governance, as a result we identified that there were issues with us accepting telephone answerphone messages from patients ordering their repeat medication. We completed an audit of the ways patients order their medications from the practice and whilst the majority of patients use our pre order dispensing system or order via online methods there remained a proportion who ordered by leaving an answerphone message at one of our surgeries.

The main reasons why it is not considered good practice to operate an answerphone message is the safety of interpreting an answerphone message, many of ours are not clear as to what the patient wants to order, only partial messages are left at time, patients don’t always know how to pronounce their medications leaving room for error in what is processed just as examples. Often our dispensers are having to try and contact patients back to confirm what is required. This isn’t a safe way of working nor do we have the capacity to manage this extra workload when there are a number of other ways in which patients can order their medication.

As a result, effective from Monday 1^st April 2024, we will no longer be able to accept medication orders at any of our surgeries via patients leaving a message on a dispensary answerphone.

We recommend that any patients that currently use the answerphone as their primary method of ordering to move onto our Pre Ordered Dispensing System (PODS).

The PODS service works in the following way:

• When you collect your repeat medication each month you will be handed a medication slip containing the medication currently on your repeat list.
• You will be asked to tick all of the items you require for the following month, and you can raise a query at this stage about any medication or request something that you may have had previously but that is not currently on repeat.
• Please do not tick items you have sufficient quantity of, this allows us to minimise medication waste.
• You will be handed a collection date for the following month for you to collect your medication
• You do not need to place any further orders, just turn up on or just after your collection date and your medication will be ready for you

If you would like more information on our pre order medication service or to sign up to this service, please speak to one of our dispensers when collecting your next prescription at any of our surgeries.

Alternatively you can order through the following avenues:

• My Surgery App/NHS Wales App
• Our website – completing our medication request form via www.llanfyllingp.co.uk/medication-request-form
• Medication side slip – completed slips can be handed in to the dispensary at any surgery
• Posting your order to the practice
• Email - dispensary.llanfyllin@wales.nhs.uk

We will be identifying our most vulnerable patients to ensure those patients are supported with ordering their medication where using any of our ordering methods would be too difficult for them.

Upcoming Practice Closure Dates:

• Friday 29^th March & Monday 1^st April – All Day closures for the Easter Bank Holiday weekend closure
• Monday 6th May - All day closure for the Early May Bank Holiday weekend
• Monday 27th May - All day closure for the SPring Bank Holiday weekend

For urgent care whilst the surgery is closed on these dates, please call 111. If you are ringing off a mobile and unable to connect to 111, please ring 0345 46 47.

• Thursday 18th April - Morning Closure until 1pm
• Tuesday 14th May - Afternoon Closure from 1pm (phone lines close at 12pm)

For urgent care whilst the surgery is closed on these dates, please call Shropdoc on 01743 455 364.