Swan Medical Group at Petersfield was short-listed for the final of a prestigious GP award.
Its acute care team made the final of the Practice Nursing Award which was part of the GP National Awards 2021.
The ten-strong team led by nurse practitioner Kat Graham just missed out on winning the award at the recent prize-giving ceremony – but it was a tremendous achievement to make the top five out of 288 nurse teams throughout the UK.
The success follows a year after Swan’s Emily Spalding won the coveted Practice Manager of the year in 2020.
The acute care team consists of two paramedics, a pharmacist and seven nurse practitioners.
Swan partner Dr Andrew Holden said: “We are incredibly proud of the team and its achievements. For them to be short-listed for the award, a year after Emily’s success, shows how fortunate that we, as a practice, are to have them with us as we strive to provide the very best health services we can to our 21,000 patients.
“The team provides a rapid access service, plays a big part in providing long-term health services and a frailty service to our patients and it also covers a frailty service for a neighbouring practice and a home visiting service to over 69,000 patients covering seven local practices.
“The team have gone above and beyond in the last year. It single-handedly provided a visiting service to provide COVID-19 vaccinations to our local care home residents and staff as well as housebound patients. The first doses were all administered before the government target.
“The Rapid Access Service has greatly supported our GPs, enabling us to deal with more complex cases.”
Kat Graham has been elemental in setting up the local COVID-19 vaccination centre which has already delivered more than 60,000 vaccines to patients.
She has also ensured Swan’s internal COVID-19 measures were safe and up-to-date, including recording a video for patients of ‘what to expect’ when they visited us during the last year.
Kat Graham said: “Day-to-day the team provides both acute and pro-active home visiting to our most vulnerable housebound patients. Acute visits are undertaken quickly and can be quickly reviewed by the doctors allowing the most effective care pathway. This helps ensure prompt hospital admission is possible, or provision is put in place for them to stay at home if preferable.
“The visiting team also provides flu vaccinations for our housebound and care home resident patients.
“The rapid access service provides nurse/paramedic based care for acute medical problems, patients are telephone triaged and seen face-to-face. This service has greatly supported our GPs, enabling them to see more complex conditions and has been running continually throughout the pandemic.”