Elm Tree Surgery

Parking affecting appointments

Parking affecting appointments

From the 10th February Oxfordshire County Council are implementing a parking scheme in Shrivenham as requested by the Parish Council.

This will impact the service we can provide as a surgery. All our clinical team commute in and most of our admin team do as well.  We have been running a campaign to try and stop this scheme and have over 600 signatures on our petition and support from the Shrivenham Pharmacy and other businesses on the High Street.

As you are aware we have an ‘unusual’ building for a general practice surgery, we have no dedicated parking and are the only GP surgery we (or the County Council) are aware of where this is the case. We did robustly respond in the consultation period last summer with support from the BSW ICB (Integrated Care Board) but unfortunately no concessions were made in the scheme to accommodate the service we provide.

Due to the parking scheme staff will have to move cars every 3 hours to another parking spot. Or they will have to park near the memorial hall and walk in. As most staff have a fixed window of time, they can work due to childcare and other commitments it does mean unfortunately an impact on the time during the day they can be seeing patients.

Our GPs and other home visiting staff need access to their vehicles to perform home visits to see housebound patients. This includes for palliative cases from South Marston to Faringdon and may be with minimal notice.

We have explored several options including other sites for parking and trying to acquire permits. We have liaised with the council officers implementing the scheme to understand it better, we have also asked our MP to consider looking at this.  We really do feel we have explored all options available to us.

We will be allocated up to two permits in total for our 33+ staff, these are vehicle specific and not transferable. We have explored if we can access more but have been advised that this is not possible.

Therefore, we feel we have no choice than to have 2 blocks a day when a clinical member of staff can move their vehicle if they are working the whole day, which would entail being in the building for over 10 hours.

Last year the BMA (British Medical Association) recommended that GP’s see a maximum of 25 patients a day , however at the time as a surgery we did not implement these recommendations as we were aware that this would impact availability , sadly we will now have been compelled to move towards this  model as we will need to allocate slots for our clinicians to leave the practice to move their cars .

We have attached the BMA guidance for reference around workloads and appointments.

BMA Guidance

https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/gp-practices/managing-workload/safe-working-in-general-practice/daily-working-contacts#:~:text=The%20European%20Union%20of%20General,than%2025%20contacts%20per%20day.

https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/gp-practices/managing-workload/safe-working-in-general-practice/appointments