Inside Path House - Kirkcaldy's new super surgery
Danyel VanReenen meets the GPs at the helm of the surgery after it added patients from Nicol Street surgery
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Two GPs from Kirkcaldy's Path House Medical Practice have opened up after taking on 6,000
00:05 new patients from the Nicholls Street surgery this summer.
00:08 Eight weeks after the merger, this is how things are going.
00:11 So it was a long process.
00:14 So it's been about a year in the planning between ourselves and the health board and
00:24 Nicholls Street.
00:25 And it's taken a lot of work on everybody's part to make it happen, but it's come together
00:35 quite nicely in the end.
00:38 Lots and lots of challenges.
00:39 In the start of this process, we had a practice that were going to retire and we had 6,000
00:45 patients that were not going to have a home and there was no real solution to the problem.
00:52 And because there's no solutions, we had to come up with that idea of what may hold for
00:58 the future because we see this is going to be an ongoing problem because it's not going
01:03 to be an isolated event.
01:06 After the merger was announced, there were a lot of community concerns about capacity,
01:09 but so far things are going well.
01:12 So we've actually more than matched the GP sessions that were on there on a weekly basis
01:19 at Nicholls Street before.
01:21 So the cover, the clinician cover is as good as if not slightly better than it was across
01:27 the two sites in the past.
01:30 In terms of recruitment, the merger has actually had a really positive impact on Path House.
01:35 Recruitment in the past for us has been a massive problem.
01:37 We've been really struggling to recruit over the last 10 years.
01:41 Nicholls Street struggled for years to recruit to replace the retiring GPs and just couldn't.
01:45 But this model of a bigger practice seemed to be more appealing to younger GPs and so
01:52 the recruitment process this time worked and we have managed to recruit, which we just
01:57 hadn't before and that has to be the difference.
02:01 Although things have been going well, Dr Murphy and Dr Stewart say it'll still be some time
02:05 before they know the true feelings of the community about the transition.
02:09 I mean it's difficult for us to know only eight weeks in.
02:14 I think you're right, there were loads of concerns about loads of different things,
02:20 things like parking, things like home visits, things like how the prescription is going
02:25 to work and some things have kind of transitioned well, some things there are still issues with
02:30 and glitches with that we're still trying to iron out.
02:34 Yeah, I mean you're quite right.
02:36 The difficulty is that you only know once the patients have been through the system
02:41 for a little while and to see because it's a completely different change and at this
02:45 stage if you ask a panel of them what they thought they'd say they probably wouldn't
02:49 know yet because it's still quite new.
02:52 The merger has come with its own set of challenges but Dr Stewart described them as teething problems.
02:57 We managed to run the service, it's how we think it should go.
03:00 All other things are just mechanical day to day running issues.
03:04 We've got issues with just the usual things, people who are getting booked into slightly
03:09 wrong places, things that just need a wee bit of tidying up so that's just an ongoing
03:13 problem but nothing major.
03:15 The challenges are when something goes slightly wrong will we have capacity for that and we
03:20 did have a couple of little issues with that in the last couple of weeks and the wheels
03:24 didn't fall off which is really good news because that means there is a little bit of
03:29 slack in the system and that's always your worry is that if you run at 100% when something
03:34 goes wrong you've got no capacity to make that work and that's when services stop working
03:40 and as they start closing clinics we can't do this, we have to go back to emergencies
03:45 only which is what nobody ever liked which is what fires were doing basically but yes
03:49 we seem to have touched wood, some slack in the system.
03:52 Whether that continues to come in towards the winter only time will tell but at the
03:56 minute it's relatively reassuring and the teething things are just mechanical things
04:02 in the system, you start some things up so they should just sort themselves out.
04:06 Ultimately no matter how patients feel about the merger Dr Murphy said it is better than
04:10 the alternatives.
04:13 It's not what patients had before but it's better than some of the alternatives and I
04:21 think we're trying to do the best we can with the resources that we have and no service
04:25 is perfect and no service is ever, I don't think, ever going to meet the demand out there
04:29 but we're doing our best and if this hadn't happened the demand really wasn't going to
04:36 be met at all so I think it's weighing up the alternative.