Members of our Primary Care workforce from across the North Cumbria area (which includes West, East and North) recently took part in a new induction session run by Primary Care Services North Cumbria.
Extremely positive feedback was received from all participants following the first of a new pilot being run for practices and Primary Care Networks (PCNs). The sessions introduce staff to the local world of primary care and provide them with information on a range of topics including organisational structures, how practices are financed, the importance of accurate coding, patient data and records access and highlighting some of the key resources available.
One of the resources covered was Community HealthPathways which provides localised pathways of care, symptoms, condition specific and non-clinical information to support the Primary Care teams in their patient management. The Pathways are available to support all members of the Primary Care team to manage the wide range of information staff need to manage their day-to day job. This year the Pathways resource celebrated its third Birthday in North Cumbria with over 330,000 page views on the site and almost 300 live pathways including some of the highest viewed pages of Tonsilitis, Hypertension and Weight Management.
Staff Surveys also highlighted that staff requested more of a focus on staff wellbeing, so the sessions incorporated time to highlight resources which have been brought together for staff on the new Primary Care Services North Cumbria website.
It was also an opportunity to provide an overview of the work being done to highlight recruitment in the area and generally answer other questions raised around working in Primary Care.
Sam Gargett, Project Manager for Primary Care Services North Cumbria said: “It really was a great opportunity to present to new members of staff and provide them with a thorough overview and some really useful local information to help them in their roles.
“Having a mix of clinical and non-clinical staff in attendance really allowed staff to share various points of view as to why processes are done in certain ways in busy practices, which created some really constructive conversations and raised some important learning points and questions.
“As a former Practice Manager I know how busy life in primary care can be and how essential it is to have time for these learning opportunities, which help to support the learning of people’s roles. This is the sort of introduction that looking back I would have found to be incredibly beneficial and it’s really important that we support staff with their wellbeing and learning.
“This was our first session so I’ve taken away some learning so that we can continue to improve our local induction as part of the pilot and scoping work we are undertaking, but it was a really good starting point and fantastic to see how positively it was received by the staff who attended and from their Practice Managers when they returned back to their practices.”
