We feel it is really important to keep our patients up to date with what is happening in primary care in Workington. We appreciate that we can always do more to communicate any changes and developments to our patients and patient communication is one of our priorities.
Where we started
At the end 2020, it was apparent that primary care services in Workington were in an extremely vulnerable position with respect to medical and nursing staffing as our practices faced difficulty recruiting doctors and nurses to fill their vacancies.
We came to believe that merging the five practices was going to be the only means of providing an equitable level of service to every person in Workington, thereby avoiding the huge problems associated with the forced closure of two or more of the five practices.
Now
All patients in Workington are registered with James Street Group Practice. We continue to have five sites Oxford Street, Orchard House, Solway, James Street and Beechwood.
We have one clinical team, one admin team, one reception team, one medicines team and one management team working across the town.
We have taken positive steps to ensure we provide a sustainable and safe primary care service in the town. We continue to experience significant challenges with GP recruitment. We have been unsuccessful in recruiting GPs which is a local and national problem and the ongoing Covid pandemic often impacts on our staffing levels.
To ensure the safety of our staff and patients it has been necessary to consolidate our patient-facing services and make best use of our facilities in each site. This decision was taken in order to ensure GPs are available on each site to provide clinical support to our Nursing and healthcare teams and in the event of a medical emergency. This has not reduced the number of appointments in the town.
Clinical appointments are currently provided from our Orchard House, Beechwood and James Street sites. Patients can be asked to attend any of the sites and see any GP for an appointment. Patients are told which site to attend when they are booked for their appointment.
One of our upmost priorities to our patients is our commitment to continue providing our COVID booster programme which has been a huge success to date. After an extensive survey of all of our sites, Solway site was identified as our ‘pop up’ vaccination site due to layout of the facility and adequate parking spaces.
Oxford Street site is the base for our Medicines Hub and provides a single point of service for all prescription needs. We aim to simplify and streamline the prescription service, reducing wastage, synchronising repeat prescriptions, undertake medication reviews, and work closely with our community pharmacies.
Our aim is to improve patient experience and access and we continue to listen to patient feedback to implement continuous service improvements.
Many thanks for your continued support and understanding.
