Hackney GP Training practices

Well Street practice

Well Street is a large inner-city practice with a list size of 9400. Our patients are drawn from a wide range of cultures, class, race and religious backgrounds. Their needs range widely and often call for innovative and imaginative solutions to which the practice tries to respond. Ninety percent of our patients live within 500 metres of the practice. We accept anyone who wishes to register from this area.

The population of Hackney is highly mobile and this results in a high turnover of patients. An important demographic feature of the practice is its high number of under 5's and younger women. Both these groups make big demands on the practice, which is heightened by the extent of social deprivation experienced by these groups in an inner city area such as ours. Many of our patients are poorly housed with new roots in the community and often lack the resources of money, language, education and job skills.

To help us deal with these complex problems we have a deprivation allowance for 100% of our population. We have good working relationships with two attached Health Visitors, two attached District nurses and a team of midwives who jointly staff our weekly ante-natal clinic. We have recently expanded our premises which has allowed us to house 4 Care Managers for the elderly from Hackney Social Services within our building. We have a good working relationship with the South-East-Locality-Mental-Health Team. A Community Drugs Team counselor consults in the practice once a week. We also have three highly skilled full-time practice nurses who offer a wide range of services using protocols agreed by the partners. The partners and nurses together are exploring the role of nurses in triage and this is an area we feel we want to develop.

There are seven partners in the practice, one GP retainer, one clinical assistant, and a GP registrar. Two of us are trainers. One is also a senior lecturer in the department of general practice at Barts and The London and another is joint chair of the local PCT.

We have been a training practice since the early 70's, and a high percentage of ex-trainees have gone on to become partners in local practices. We were the founding practice of the department of general practice at Barts in 1977 and have always been committed to continuing education of patients, staff, medical students, trainees and partners. Medical students come to the practice regularly from all five years of the undergraduate curriculum. We are also a designated Nursing 2000 practice.

We are fully computerised with the 'GPCare' system and have path links with the Homerton Hospital. We are moving towards a paperless state.

We are members of the HACDOC out of hours cooperative On Call Service. This means each partner doing on call average of two sessions a month to cover weekdays and weekends until 2300hrs. 2300hrs till 0700hrs is covered by the THEDOC. Registrars take part on the on call sessions, doing as much as their trainer and always covered by the trainer or a partner.

Typical GP registrars weekly schedule