In April 2014 we merged our three practices to form Beacon Medical Group serving 33,000 patients.Our vision remains to offer the best possible quality of care closer to home using collaboration and innovation to achieve this.
Our scale allowed us to consider offering new services to our patients. We decided to develop our own Dermatology and MSK services for our patients.
Dermatology services both locally and nationally are under considerable strain. We use our own GP's with special interests to provide this service.
The service is CCG-commissioned and is run by fully accredited GPwSI's. Patients access this service by an internal referral using the messaging system already built in to the patient's electronic record. This increases the information that is available to the clinician as well as photos for the Dermatology patients. These referrals are usually triaged within a week, and when needed patients are seen within 2-4 weeks.
This means that advice at triage is a more likely outcome, and in turn there is more capacity to see patients very quickly compared to our local secondary care service. Patients love being able to get expert advice from a trusted clinician closer to home in a timely way. Feedback is overwhelmingly positive. The really cool part of this service is that it reduces the number of patients needing to be seen in secondary care by nearly 80% for both Dermatology and most parts of the MSK service.
This has saved significant money for the CCG.
Our referral graphs are attached.
For more information please contact; Dr Jonathan Cope Managing Partner Beacon Medical Group [email protected]