Source · Select Committees · Health and Social Care Committee
Recommendation 9
9
Deferred
Paragraph: 48
Provide standardised national training for primary care receptionists to enhance patient navigation.
Recommendation
Receptionists play an incredibly important role in primary care that often goes unrecognised. Given they are often the first point of contact with primary care for most patients, NHS England should review and consider providing standardised national training to drive up standards and equip receptionists with the skills required to navigate and signpost in a 21st century NHS.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government partially accepts the recommendation but deflects by focusing on exploring opportunities for automating processes in general practice to free up clinical capacity. It highlights ongoing support for two pilots testing automated coding of bowel screening results and other administrative processes in London.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
48
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government · verbatim extract
Deferred
Accept. We support this recommendation, and we recognise the important role that receptionists, who will often be the first point of contact for patients at their practice, play in general practice teams. Following the pandemic, practices are making greater use of triage, to direct patients to the most appropriate services and professionals first time, and this means that practice receptionists have a crucial role in signposting patients and helping them to navigate new ways of accessing general practice services. As announced in the Delivery Plan for Recovering Access to Primary Care, we are investing in a new National Care Navigation Training programme for up to 6,500 staff rolling out from summer 2023. The training will use the Care Navigation Competency Framework developed by Health Education England and every practice will benefit. Care navigation will be a critical function to help navigate patients to the most appropriate member of the practice team, or to self-care, community pharmacy, administrative teams or other, more appropriate, local services. In the 2023/24 GP contract changes, one of the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) Quality Improvement modules will focus on optimising demand and capacity in general practice with an emphasis on using data to analyse potentially avoidable appointments and build on care navigation and use of wider workforce or local services to reduce pressure on general practice. It is the responsibility of practices themselves to ensure that their receptionists are adequately trained, and NHS England made £35m available between 2016/17 – 2020/21 to Clinical Commissioning Groups (as they then were) to fund training and backfill for GP receptionists and clerical staff. NHS England has developed a programme of e-learning tailored to support both administrative staff and clinical roles in general practices to effectively carry out information gathering, signposting and triage and to support decision making about the appropriateness of different types of consultations and care.
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