Who is Managing the practice?
I often get asked, are you the Practice Manager? And who is the Practice Manager? So I thought I would write my blog this month to answer these questions.
To give some background, I have been part of the Highlands Practice management team for the past 18 years and in that time have taken on a number of different parts of the jobs and some projects alongside the main role.
I am currently the Managing Partner – responsible for managing the practice as a business and have overall management responsibility. I have seen a huge change in the requirements of the Management role during my time in Primary Care Management, and Practice Managers all across the country are struggling to manage the scope and pressure of their roles with increasing demand. This includes new legislative changes, technology changes, financial pressures, new roles/professions, growing patient expectations, a challenging NHS economy plus the intensifying need to support staff wellbeing and mental health. Many Practice Managers are leaving the profession for early retirement, taking years of experience with them and many GP Practices are finding themselves vulnerable and unable to keep their businesses running, sometimes leading to closures.
Thankfully, the GP partners at Jubilee, Highlands and Whiteley are hugely supportive of their management team. They have been forward thinking in their approach to Practice Management over the past 5 years, and I’m delighted to say that their foresight and proactive approach to working closely together and then merging the 3 practices to form Meon Health has been a really important part of developing a resilient and specialist management team to ensure that the practice are able to continue to be viable, and attract managers to work with them.
Meon Health Practice is run as a single business delivering care for patients from 3 different practice buildings. Our practice management team are divided into specialist areas which allow us to develop specialist knowledge and skills and be less reliant on a single general manager – these are: Human Resources, Operations & Patient Services, Business & Administration.
Gareth Evans is our Operations Manager, and his role is primarily to support the smooth running of the practice. He has a team of people in a variety of roles who assist him in his job, and a number of expert roles he can call up when needed, including IT, digital systems and communications. From a patient perspective, Gareth, as Operations Manager, has many of the responsibilities that a traditional Practice Manager would have e.g. managing staff, managing NHS contracts, and problem solving for patients.
Gareth’s pre-NHS experience was in a customer service sector and as such he is passionate about running a service that delivers good customer service, and we have seen some great improvements since he has been in post over the last 6 months.
A typical day for Gareth might consist of – agreeing a change to clinics when a member of staff is sick, supporting a member of staff with solving a problem, reviewing a process to make improvements, talking to staff about new ways of working, meeting a patient to resolve a complaint, completing a report of contract performance, or partaking in a webinar about new systems developing.
Gareth has been at the practice now for 2 years and has been developing his knowledge across different parts of the practice. He is a great asset to the practice, and I trust if you have had the opportunity to talk to him you will have had a great experience.
I hope that this small insight into our management team is helpful and as we continue with our blogs and newsletters I will endeavour to introduce other roles of interest.