10,000 patients to give verdict in pilot GP review
Chairman of the Medical Council’s Competence Assurance Committee, Dr Colm Quigley, said they were seeking 400 practicing GPs to volunteer for the quality review scheme developed by the council and the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP).
GPs taking part will be asked to complete an online self-assessment questionnaire and to nominate eight medical and eight non-medical colleagues who will fill out similar questionnaires.
In addition, 25 patients who attend the GPs will be asked to fill out a 10-minute anonymous and confidential questionnaire on a specified day at the doctor’s surgery.
The completed questionnaires will be sent to an independent research company for analysis and the doctors will get a confidential report that will summarise all of the responses.
All of the forms will be scanned by a computer so written comments cannot be processed and patients taking part will be advised that written complaints should be sent directly to the council.
Dr Quigley, who is also vice-chairman of the council, pointed out that the kind of review they were proposing was already happening in Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Canada.
The council decided to pilot a quality improvement initiative that has been run successfully in Alberta, Canada, for the past seven years. Already, 20 doctors have volunteered to take part in the review, which is also supported by all of the medical training bodies in Ireland.
As well as gaining educational credits, doctors taking part will be exempt from the process again for five years.
If the programme is successful it will be rolled out to all doctors, including hospital specialists.
The council’s director of competence assurance, Dr Lynda Sisson, said the council intended reviewing the best and worst performers in the autumn.
Dr Sisson said it was an entirely educational and supportive programme and was not linked to the Council’s Fitness to Practice Committee. But, she said, if very urgent patient safety issues were raised they would have to intervene. Such cases, however, were expected to be extremely rare and unlikely to happen.
A peer assistant programme will be available to help doctors identify areas for improvement and making positive changes.
