The Practice

Thorney Medical Practice serves the 3 villages of Thorney, Eye and Newborough in the Fens to the East of Peterborough. The practice area is bounded to the north by the Cambridgeshire/Lincolnshire border, to the south by the River Nene and to the West by the Parkway. This 100 square mile area is mainly arable farmland ; however, the village of Eye is close to the eastern fringe of Greater Peterborough making the practice a mix of urban and rural. The list size is 7250, encompassing a wide mix of social classes and age. The practice dispenses to about 18% of patients, mainly concentrated in the village of  Newborough.

The practice is part of  Peterborough PCT. The vast majority of patients receive hospital care through the Peterborough Hospitals, though a few patients elect to travel East to King's Lynn or South to Huntingdon.

The practice operates out of 2 purpose built modern premises. There are a total of  9 consulting rooms, and two treatment rooms. The registrar will always be able to use the same consulting room in each surgery. One consulting room is fitted for video-recording of consultations.

The full range of Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Management Activities take place within the practice; some are nurse-led. All partners are on the Child Health Surveillance, Minor Surgery and Obstetric lists.

Practice staffing

The surgery at Thorney is the administrative centre of the practice. The Practice Manager is based there together with the IT staff and other administrative staff. Each surgery has a full complement of reception and secretarial staff. At the surgeries in Thorney and Newborough, receptionists are also trained as dispensers.

Attached to the practice and operating in all three surgeries are a team of district nurses, the community midwife and health visitor. A community podiatrist provides services at Eye and a community physiotherapist and members of the PPCC (Counselling Services) operate at Thorney Surgery.

IT in the Surgery

The practice uses EMIS on fully networked workstations through out the practice. All clinicians maintain clinical records on the computer and no paper records are kept. All incoming correspondence is scanned and attached to the patients' clinical records for retrieval at any workstation across the network. This allows any patient to be seen in any of the three surgeries with access to the full clinical record. Clinical audit is greatly facilitated by such comprehensive use of the IT.

Pathology and Radiology results are filed by "Path Links" onto the computer system (and again are available for all patients across the network).

All practice clinicians and the practice manager have e-mail facilities through NHS Net

The practice recently joined the EMIS ACCESS service - allowing patients to request their repeat medication using the internet. This is a completely secure and confidential system.

Training in the practice

The practice has been a training practice since 1992. Dr SD Richards is presently the trainer, having taken over from Dr AJ Knights in 2001. However, both trainers take responsibility for and play an active part in training; both give formal tutorials and provide post-surgery feedback. All partners in the practice provide support to Registrars in the form of tutorials or post-surgery feedback. Other members of the Primary Health Care team are actively engaged in training within their own disciplines (for example, the Health Visitor encourages the Registrar to spend time with her during baby clinics to help learn skills for Child Health Surveillance.)

Registrars are expected to attend regular educational and business meetings within the practice and are afforded protected time for the VTS Half Day release scheme.