Hackney GP Training practices

The Lawson practice

The Lawson Practice is an innovative inner city practice whose team works from wonderful purpose built surgery to provide a high level of service to its 6,500 patients. These are drawn from diverse backgrounds, education, housing, skill mix and culture, and everyone who works at the Lawson Practice is committed to providing access to quality healthcare in a friendly and efficient way to our challenging practice population.

There are five partners and two GP Registrars who, between them, offer skills as GP Trainer, VTS Course Organiser, Senior Lecturer and Lecturer in the Departments of General Practice of two prestigious Medical schools. Their wide-ranging interests include care of the elderly (they provide clinical sessions at two local Nursing Homes), women's and children's health, drug dependency management and development of primary care overseas and mental health. The doctors see a large number of dug dependency problems and has specialist/ generalist expertise in this area. A full range of contraceptive services is offered, including insertion of implants and one of the trainers is a family planning trainer. The practice has a high number of patients with severe mental illness, caring for the residents of a local supervised accommodation facility. The practice runs a community Antenatal Clinic. Minor surgery is performed here. Four of the partners are at present doing Fellow by Assessment of RCGP as part of an interest in quality practice. The practice runs Diabetic and Coronary Heart Disease Annual Review Clinics.

Both Registrars have their own consulting room. They receive three hours of protected tutorial time per week, which is instead of consulting! (see timetable below). The practice is part of the Hackney Out of Hours Cooperative. The Registrars are expected to do the standard sessions at the co-operative which probably works out slightly less than the on-call done by the partners, which is one weekend and one weekday evening session per week. Registrars attend twice weekly, one hour multiprofessional educational meetings in-house, aimed at continual professional development for medical and nursing staff of the practice.

The doctors are supported by an excellent team of two practice nurses, two district nurses, two health visitors, a practice manager, ancillary staff and Turkish advocates who are well motivated and innovative - both professionally and personally - and who offer their own individual expertise to the team. The practice is committed to working as a primary health care team and there are regular team meetings to support this.

The practice encourages all members to participate in continuing professional development/ education.

The practice is rarely without students or visitors from other health professions and all this is done alongside providing routine and specialist general practice surgeries daily. There is an Educational Resource Centre in the building.

It is not unusual for the practice to be involved in research both as collaborators and/or in providing study populations.

The practice computer system is used to support clinical, administrative and management systems. The practice is paperless and all consultations, letters and reports from th hespital are kept on the computr. All the computers, including the Registrars', have NHS link for online information such as Medline and email. We are a University linked practice which enables students (and others) to access a variety of on-line information.

Timetable

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
9-10 Tutorial	9-12.30 Consulting	9-11.30 Tutorial	9-12.30 Consulting	9-12.30 Consulting	9-12 Emergencies Rota 1/6
10-12.30 Duty Doctor shared with a partner		11-12.30 Consuling
1-2 Primary Care team meeting	Vocational Training Scheme Half Day Release	Half Day	2.30-3.30 Partners Meeting (optional)	2-4 Admin time
2.30-4 Visits			3.30-5.30 Visits with partner	4-5.30 Consulting
4-6 Consulting
6-7 Duty Doctor share with a partner