How the receptionist got their scowl

Written by: S. Connor

I believe wholeheartedly that of all the roles in the practice, the reception team have the worst deal. They get paid the least amount of money and they take the most crap from patients, doctors and other members of staff. They work relentlessly from the moment they arrive until they finally get to go home, and the mad thing about it is that they could all earn more money working in a supermarket or behind a bar, but for the most part they stay.

 
I think that we have all had a higher turnover of staff in general since the pandemic, and I know that we have seen a few people come and go with rapidity on reception, but the majority of the old guard have never considered leaving. I admire them enormously, and in all honesty, I do not think that I could do their job on a day-to-day basis.

They are the bedrock of general practice and the foundation upon which we build, and they get no downtime, no real break from their role. Even GPs get a break (if only for a minute) between patients, but for reception a shift is often non-stop picking up phones or dealing face to face with patients. They are highly trained individuals, who receive little to no respect for their experience, and it seems incredible to me that they put up with the treatment they receive. 

If I ever speak to a person, whether it be a patient or someone I know and they are doing a bit of reception bashing, I ask them the same questions;

How would you respond if you were told that you were useless, every day, for years, by the people you serve?
How would you feel, if on a weekly basis at least one patient told you that you couldn’t do your job, or that somehow, their own failure to order their medication was your fault?
How would you feel if you were paid less than £10 an hour and were told by a patient that if they die, it’s your fault?
How would you feel if the public you serve completely disregard your training and the questions you ask because you are only a receptionist?
How would you feel if you worked your arse off for a public who happily label you and your colleagues as dragons?

I think that over time some GP receptionists (and I must stress that it is some, not all) grow a thick skin in order to protect themselves. Perhaps the dragon scales that patients sometimes see are more of a reflection of the way receptionists are treated than of them as people. If you are relentlessly bombarded with insults surely it is only natural that a defence mechanism builds up, and that being told you’re useless results in a lack of enthusiasm when dealing with your 50^th phone call that day. It is very hard to remain breezy and full of smiles when all you see are unhappy faces, who cannot understand why you can’t immediately give in to their every demand.

This is not a piece about how to make things better for reception, because until the public change their attitude to these women, because on the whole women tend to make up most reception teams in GP land, then we will never make it a truly enjoyable job. Don’t get me wrong it isn’t doom and gloom all the time, but I must admit that particularly since the beginning of covid, our reception team seem to be given more and more of a hard time.
So much for clap for the NHS, now we’re a couple of years in people forget that without receptionists, there would have been no vaccine clinics. Without reception, the practice simply could not run.

This piece is written purely to acknowledge what receptionists do, and the fact that they do it for very little in the grand scheme of things.

If you can, and where you can, remind your reception team just how much you appreciate them. It could be making them a coffee when you know they haven’t had time to leave their desk or buying them some treats on a Friday to end the week with a bit of a sugar rush. Or even, simply thanking them for everything they do.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in your own stress in such a relentless job as this, but we aren’t the only ones working hard. Receptionists do not deserve the public reputation they have, and so now, right now, as soon as you’ve finished reading this, I want you to go and tell your team just how much you appreciate them for everything they do.

Here’s to you, the GP receptionists of the UK, I take my hat off to you all. Thank you.

New Year, Hell Yeah!

Written by: Craig Arnott

The Dene Team is delighted to announce that from this afternoon (05/01/2023), Dene Healthcare has officially joined the Rocialle Healthcare family!!!

 

Rocialle are a UK leader in single use surgical instruments and, like Dene, prioritise their focus on achieving outstanding service and value for the UK healthcare market.

 

A little bit about Rocialle:

•           Formed in 1977, Rocialle Healthcare has been a trusted supplies partner for over 40 years.

•           Their South Wales head-office (Ty Mynydd) incorporates on-site sterilisation facilities and one of Europe's largest medical cleanrooms.

•           From their 130,000 sq. ft, purpose-built distribution centre (Parc Agility) they regularly deliver vital products and services to virtually every hospital in the UK.

•           Their core product offering includes single-use instruments, procedure packs, medical packs,  PPE, and wound care.

•           In addition to supplying primary care trade distributors, in 2022 they created the Rocialle PracticeCare division to serve GP surgeries with a complete portfolio of medical equipment, consumables and pharmaceuticals.

•           Rocialle also acquired MidMeds Limited in October-2022.

 

The whole team at Dene Healthcare are thrilled to have teamed up with Rocialle and we are looking forward to continuing our mission of adding efficiencies and time savings wherever we can to allow General Practice valuable additional resource to focus on patient care.

 

There will only be one immediate to change to Dene Healthcare with our Managing Director and Founder, Michael Drakard announcing his retirement at the end of March 2023.

Our Commercial Director Craig Arnott said: “We would like to take this opportunity to thank Mike for believing in the team at Dene and allowing us all the opportunity and freedom to prove ourselves under his leadership.  He will be missed immensely, but we will continue to target fulfilling his mission in supporting General Practice wherever we can.  We would also like to express our gratitude in finding and partnering with Rocialle before his retirement.  We are looking forward to enjoying the future with Rocialle as we have the past with Mike!”

It is not a priority!

Written by: S.Apone

I’d like to take a moment to consider the phrase it’s not a priority.

Being a practice with more than one site, it can be difficult to manage teams who are split geographically, and it can be even more of a challenge as a PM. You’re the go-to person when something goes wrong, the one who can solve the problems, and the one who doesn’t flap, right?

The truth is that this isn’t always the case. We as PMs are as capable as the next person of getting into a strop about our workload and sometimes, when for the fourth time that day you’re met with a question about a dodgy printer, you might snap and grumble something about not getting a moments peace, but we must, as the leaders of our teams take a step back at times and consider the consequences of our words.

Recently, a supervisor at one of our sites was telling me that she had been upset by the response of a senior manager when she, the supervisor, required some assistance.

To give a bit of background, the supervisor was trying to organise transport of covid vaccines and the accompanying stock to one of our sites. She had called the surgery holding the vaccine and asked if she could drive over and collect the jabs ready for a clinic the following morning. The only thing she asked of the manager was whether the stock was ready to collect. The manager, who was undoubtedly busy had snapped back that it wasn’t a priority, and the supervisor was, to my mind at least, understandably put out by this reply. No matter how busy the manager was, it was not a kind reply. The supervisor had spent the day working her socks off cancelling clinics for a GP off sick, covered on reception for someone on annual leave and had come in the previous evening well after hours because of a problem with the alarm, and now she was being told that something that is actually pretty important was not a priority.

If those at the top can’t see why this is a problem, then I would ask you to consider what I believe to be the single most important piece of advice I have ever been given as a manager. Imagine at all times that your staff are wearing signs around their necks, each of which read ‘make me feel important’. I guarantee that if you employ this tactic at work, you will have a happier team, who are never made to feel small or insignificant.

The NHS are losing staff in their thousands, and we need to be mindful of the way we treat our people if we want to keep them. The phrase its not a priority does nothing more than make a member of staff feel like their stress is unimportant to you as their manager. It is not impossible for a comment like this to become the proverbial straw that broke the camels back, the final blow that makes an employee consider their options and decide whether or not they want to continue to work for you.

It's a lonely place at the top, made lonelier if you can’t retain a good team of people around you. You are much less likely to achieve this if you do not guard your words closely. Think about the impact that words barked in frustration can have on the people who are on the ground. Receptionists in particular who are the backbone of our industry should always be spoken to with kindness and gratitude. I’m not saying that you cannot reprimand your team when things go wrong, because for us all a part of management is monitoring performance, but we can do this with kindness as well.

I do not believe that people do a bad job on purpose; I believe that in general, if you train people correctly and give them the tools, they need to perform their roles then they will do their work without much interference. I also believe that if you are good to your team, they will do even more. They will go above and beyond because they know that their work isn’t going unnoticed. It’s a simple message, but one that we should all try and remember. Be kind to your team, because you have no idea what anyone is going through, and it may be that your harsh reprimand or comment becomes the thing that finally tips them over the edge. It may be that comment that causes them to take less pride in their work, or even start the hunt for a new job and new managers who will treat them better.

The supervisor I referred to earlier is a work horse, and whilst I will not name her here, I would like to dedicate this blog to her. It’s a good job that when she was called at 9pm on a Friday night by the cleaners who were struggling to set the alarm she didn’t respond with it’s not a priority otherwise the senior manager would have found herself having to drive for an hour to sort it out

The wellbeing of our teams should always be our priority because without them, we would be out of the job.

How we can help songbirds this winter

Written by: Georgia Dossis

I’ve grown up to see my mum treat her garden like a small arboretum and get really excited about her little sparrows that come and eat at the fat balls that she puts out, but I didn’t think anything other than it’s a bit of wildlife in the back garden.

Songbirds actually help to keep the balance between plants, herbivores, predators, and prey by dispersing seeds. They also react quickly to changes in in environment and have been proven to act as early warning signs for extreme weather conditions, from tracking their migration patterns.

Scientists are looking at the gaps within their knowledge about the effects of climate change and are finding that more than half of the UK’s songbirds are threatened or already in decline. Their research is ongoing but, in the meantime, there are ways that we can help them, especially during the winter months where their habitat becomes a lot harder for them to survive.

Feeding:

You don’t need a fancy bird feeder to feed birds (unless you want one). Easy and ecofriendly alternatives to this are using either a round clean bin lid or upcycling a plastic bottle into a bird feeder. This can even become a fun activity with the kids or family.

Seeds and fat balls are popular amongst all birds, you can also use leftovers such as fruit cake or mince pies, dried fruit, unsalted nuts, or apples and pears that are past their best.

Placing some seed or a fat ball under bushes / around any tree’s you may have for any of the shy birds out there.

Keeping bird feeders out of reach of pets.

If you don’t have a garden that you can do this in, hanging baskets or a bird feeder outside your window can still be a great way to feed birds in your area, it also adds to a lovely view.

Drinking water/ Bathing:

There are again smaller ways that you can provide water for birds without needing a bird bath. For example, a bowl of water, making sure that it’s as full as it can be to ensure that it doesn’t freeze/ it takes longer to freeze, or making sure that the bowl has a dark surface to keep heat in as much as possible.

If you do have a bird bath (the same as with feeders) ensure that they are clean when you can. Refrain from putting any salts/ detergents in as this can be poisonous to birds. But making sure that it is hygienic so that it is free from bacteria as much as possible.

Housing:

Birds often use artificial bird boxes during the summer and spring to rear their young and stay safe. During the winter months birds use these as warm and shelter from bad weathers. If you don’t have a bird box you can always make one as an arts and crafts afternoon, either out of recycled material or unused woods. Also making sure that you don’t add a perch as this can encourage predators.

Don’t rush to cut back on your gardening too. If there’s no bird box, birds will often use hedges, holes in trees or crannies in rocks to build their nests for the winter.

There are so many more ways to help birds during the winter, the above are the most minimal things that you can do to help from home. It’s all about keeping up to date with conservation issues and acting on this where we can to maintain and potentially grow our ecosystem.

Green Terminology

Written by: Craig Arnott

As a business committed to being Net Zero by 2030 (ambitious – maybe, unrealistic? – we’re aware), but we’ll be sharing lots of details on our progress as well as providing useful hints for those joining us on the journey in the months and years ahead.

But right now, 3 years into our process, we thought it would be helpful to take a step back and look at some of the terminology that seems to dominate the Net Zero conversation.

So let’s start with that main term itself…

Net Zero

When businesses, governments and scientists talk about Net Zero, there may not be absolute consensus on what it looks like and how we’ll get there, but there is a general agreement on what it means.

Net Zero is the result of balancing the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere against the amount of carbon removed. It will be achieved by a combination of reducing the number of carbon emissions (less polluting technology, etc.) and increasing the level of carbon removal (by planting more trees, etc.).

When this is done right, the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere will be ‘Net Zero’ (or even better, we might even achieve overall carbon reduction).

Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3

You’ll be hearing a lot more about the three scopes used to measure progress toward Net Zero. They are the mechanism used to measure organisations’ greenhouse gas emissions, and in order to achieve true Net Zero, action must be taken to reduce all three.

Scope 1 emissions are those from sources that are directly owned or controlled by the organisation. The amount of petrol or diesel used by fleet vehicles is a good example of a Scope 1 emission.

Scope 2 emissions take this one step further, covering the indirect emissions caused by a business when, for example, it purchases and uses energy. Using that fleet example again, if an organisation were to use electric vehicles instead of petrol ones, the emissions would be produced in the generation of the electricity used to power them. These are Scope 2 emissions – outside of the direct control of the business but still their responsibility.

Scope 3 emissions are in many ways the most difficult element in achieving Net Zero status. These emissions are neither produced by the business nor the activities or assets they own or control. Instead, they exist elsewhere in the supply chain. Think of – using Dene as an example – the emissions created in the manufacture and transport of the Products we supply.

It can be very difficult to determine, never mind control Scope 3 emissions, but if all businesses take the journey to Net Zero together, one organisation’s Scope 3 emissions will be another’s Scope 1 or 2 and so on.

Carbon Neutral

This is a term that has been around for some time, and at first glance would appear to be the same as Net Zero. Like Net Zero, carbon neutrality aims to strike a balance between emitting carbon into the atmosphere and absorbing carbon from it.

There is a distinction though.

Generally, ‘carbon neutrality’ can be achieved through offsetting. That’s the act of participating in or investing in schemes designed to make equivalent carbon reductions elsewhere. That might involve, for example, investing in tree planting or green energy schemes. In theory that could mean that a business could become carbon neutral without making any reductions to the carbon it produces.

Net Zero places a much greater emphasis on proactive carbon reduction, where the main priority for a business is to reduce its own emissions, using offsetting as a secondary option.

Carbon footprint

You’re probably familiar with this term, but what does it mean? Carbon footprint can be understood as the total amount of carbon dioxide that is emitted through the activity of businesses or individuals. That includes everything from travelling by car or plane to using a kettle or the electricity used in a manufacturing plant.

Buying local produce, reducing plastic use, reducing unnecessary journeys, and even turning down the heating are all examples of the ways that households and businesses can reduce their carbon footprint.

Greenwashing

Greenwashing is essentially the marketing or PR spin that businesses dishonestly place on their products or services to capitalise on the growing interest in sustainability. The claims they make tend to paint the business in a good light even though little to nothing is actually being achieved.

A business may, for example, claim that their product uses ‘recycled materials’, and while this may be true to an extent, those materials may make up a very small percentage of the product itself. Such exaggerated claims can mislead customers into thinking better of the business.

It is important that any claims are backed up by evidence and action. Where this doesn’t exist, customers should be wary of the claims being made.

Decarbonisation

This term is generally used in a wide-reaching way, referring to the process of reducing carbon emissions resulting from human activity. It is a term favoured by businesses and governments to refer to the holistic efforts to reduce or remove global CO2 emissions.