Yesterday, Modality Mid Sussex, published their Plan for Patients at their first online patient engagement event. Tonight, the second engagement event takes place, and both my team and I will be in attendance.
In the meantime, you can find full details of the plan on the Modality website: MODSUS - Plan for Patients July 2023 DRAFT (modalitypartnership.nhs.uk)
This is their update:
Since our June 2023 update, the team have been continuing to work hard to improve access and services for our patients.
We are delighted to let you know that we have had success in recruiting additional members to both our clinical and non-clinical team. This will result in a welcome increase in the overall number of appointments we are able to offer patients both now and in the coming months.
We have seen a big increase in the number of patients using our online Patient Triage service. This new service enables patients to submit both medical and administrative requests via our website between 9am - 12 noon each weekday, removing the need to wait on the phone.
We hope to be able to expand the opening hours and capacity of this service over the coming months. Due to the expansion of our team, we have been able to reduce the time patients are waiting for their call to be answered by over 40% in June 2023. We aim to reduce this time even further, as we expand our online Patient Triage opening hours and recruit more call handlers. We know that patients are being asked to travel to other Modality sites for appointments, rather than being seen in their home practice. This has dispoportionately affected Crawley Down patients, leading to an inequality of access. We are working hard to improve this situation by changing the way we rota our clinical team.
The changes needed will take a number of weeks to implement, so please be patient with us as we make the necessary amendments to how we operate. Moving forward, we aim to keep any travel by patients for appointments to other Modality sites to a minimum. We are looking forward to meeting many of you at our planned patient engagement events both online and face to face.
We ask that patients respect that only those patients who have registered for an event will be able to attend. This is for health and safety reasons, due to venue capacity restrictions. The online events will be recorded and available to view on our website and social media.
- Modality Mid Sussex, 17th July 2023
I will of course keep my constituents updated but be assured Jeremy Quin and I are robustly together focussed on assuring all those concerned that we are very determined in assisting in the resolving the issues of dissatisfaction for our constituents.
We all recognise this matter of deep concern and are standing up for constituents which is our primary function.