Elmwood Family Doctors

Heidi Health AI

Heidi Health, an AI-powered medical scribe, is used at Elmwood Family Doctors to enhance the quality and efficiency of consultations. Heidi Health transcribes patient interactions in real-time and uses this to generate clinical notes, fill out documents, and dictate letters for GPs to review and add to your health records, ensuring accuracy and up-to-date information.

You will be asked for consent before using Heidi AI in a consultation, and you can withdraw consent at any time.

Heidi Health will help us improve accuracy in medical records, increase efficiency by automating the transcription process, and enhance patient care by allowing GPs to focus more on interactions rather than note-taking.

Heidi Health adheres to stringent NHS standards, including the DSPT and DTAC, ensuring that personal information is handled securely and confidentially.

Transcriptions and summaries are deleted once saved to patient records and are kept for no longer than one day. For more information, please read the Heidi Health patient explainer.

Freedom of Information

Information about the General Practitioners and the practice required for disclosure under this act can be made available to the public. All requests for such information should be made to the practice manager.

Confidentiality

At Elmwood Family Doctors, we take patient confidentiality very seriously. We understand that the trust between doctors and patients is built on the assurance that all personal and medical information shared during consultations will be kept private and secure.

All staff working at Elmwood Family Doctors must, from the beginning of their employment with the organisation and after the termination of their employment with the organisation, observe strict confidentiality and non-disclosure in respect of any information held by the organisation, except when required or authorised to disclose such information by the organisation or by law.

Our Caldicott Guardian, Dr. James Morton, provides guidance on confidentiality and information sharing. The Caldicott Principles ensure that people’s information is kept confidential and used appropriately. These principles are integral to our practice and are followed diligently to maintain the highest standards of patient confidentiality.

We adhere to the common law duty of confidentiality, ensuring that all patient information is handled with the utmost care and respect. This includes obtaining patient consent for the use of their data and ensuring that any sharing of information is done in compliance with legal requirements and in the best interest of the patien

Violence and aggression

The NHS operate a zero tolerance policy with regard to violence and abuse. Any form of abuse, whether physical violence, verbal abuse and threatening behaviour, whether in person, over the phone, or in writing, will not be tolerated. Elmwood Family Doctors has the right to remove abusive or violent patients from the list with immediate effect in order to safeguard practice staff, patients and other persons, and where necessary the Police will be contacted.

In this situation we will notify the patient in writing of their removal from the list and record in the patient’s medical records the fact of the removal and the circumstances leading to it.

Chaperones

All patients are entitled to have a chaperone present for any consultation, examination, or procedure.

At times a healthcare professional carrying out an examination may also request a chaperone to be present if they feel it is appropriate.

What is a chaperone?

In clinical medicine, a chaperone is an impartial observer who serves as a witness for both a patient and a healthcare professional, as a safeguard for both parties during a medical examination or procedure.

What does a chaperone do?

Chaperones are widely used for intimate examinations. A chaperone may support the patient with reassurance and emotional support during a procedure or examination that the patient may find embarrassing or uncomfortable, especially those that involve intimate areas of the body.

Chaperoning serves as a safeguard for healthcare professionals and patients by objectively witnessing the interaction.

The chaperone may also provide practical help to the healthcare professional during an examination or procedure.

Who can act as a chaperone?

Any member of the practice team who has received appropriate training can act as a chaperone.

A patient’s relatives or friends are not considered to be an impartial observer so would not usually be a suitable chaperone, but your healthcare professional will comply with any reasonable request to have such a person present during your appointment.

When can you ask for a chaperone?

If you know at the time of booking your appointment that you would like to have a chaperone present, please let the receptionist know so that we can arrange one in advance.

You can also let a member of the practice team know when you arrive for your appointment, or at any point during your consultation.

For requests made on the same day as your appointment we will endeavour to provide a chaperone, however, very occasionally it may be necessary to reschedule your appointment if a chaperone is not available.

Complaints

We aim to deal with any complaint sensitively and to resolve any problems as soon as possible, either with the people concerned or by making any appropriate changes to our services.

In all circumstances we find it most productive when people with any concerns raise them directly with us.

For more information about our complaints procedure, please have a look at our Complaints Leaflet, or for more detailed information, have a read of our Complaints Policy

GP Net Earnings

All GP practices are required to declare the mean earnings (e.g. average pay) for GPs working to deliver NHS services to patients in their practice.

The average pay for GPs working in Elmwood Family Doctors in the last financial year (2024) was £77,170 before tax and National Insurance. This is based on 5 full time GPs, and 9 part time GPs who worked in the practice for more than six months.

 

 

Named Accountable GP

All patients have a named GP who is responsible for their overall care at the practice.  You can contact the practice if you wish to know who yours is.  If you have a preference as to which GP is your “named accountable GP”, the practice will make reasonable efforts to accommodate this request.  Regardless of who your named accountable GP is you can still choose to see any GP in the Practice when you want to book an appointment.

Care Quality Commission (CQC)

 

Some of the comments from this report include;

Patients rated the practice higher than others for almost all aspects of care. Patients spoke highly of the care they received from the practice. Feedback about patients’ care and treatment was consistently positive. We observed a patient centered culture.

Common themes from patients were they felt they were treated with dignity and respect, were listened to and involved in their treatment.

CQC comment cards were all very positive and complimentary; many citing the service they received as being ‘excellent and fantastic’.

These findings aligned with the national GP survey results, which showed the practice was performing in line and predominantly above the local and national averages.

The practice had developed a comprehensive and innovative system to monitor appointments. There was continuity of care and urgent appointments available on the same day. Patients said they found it easy to make an appointment and urgent appointments were available the same day.

The practice reviewed the needs of its local population and engaged with the CCG to secure/improve service improvements where these had been identified. The practice had been involved in CCG pilots, such as pathfinder , winter access and breaking the cycle.

The practice worked very closely with other health professionals and community and voluntary services and they were focused on using every opportunity for health promotion. For example, Friend to Friend and Sharing Memories.

The practice had strong links with local schools and worked collaboratively with the school nurses to support and advise young people. Young people at schools had direct access to same day appointments for emergency contraception, when the school nurse may accompany the patient

We saw evidence that an enhanced level of service provision for the diagnosis and support for people with dementia was provided above what is required under core General Medical Service (GMS) contracts.

Views of external stakeholders, for example Greater Huddersfield CCG were very positive and aligned to our findings.