Following a successful trial, the Island is now looking to recruit more clinicians to a new role that gives patients better access to health services in their local GP practice.
For the past year, Physician Associates have been working under the direct supervision of practice GPs in pilot schemes at Newport Health Centre and Ventnor Medical Centre.
An emerging role in the NHS throughout the UK, Physician Associates are medically-trained and highly-qualified generalist healthcare practitioners able to perform a number of duties such as taking medical histories, performing examinations, analysing test results, and diagnosing illnesses.
The support they offer gives patients faster access to the professional medical care they need while at the same time freeing up GPs to focus on patients who have a clinical need to see them.
Following the successful year at Newport Health Centre, Katie Stebbins, is now – with her counterpart from Ventnor-based Romeo Varela - leading the drive to recruit more Physician Associates to the Island.
An American from Maine, she is using her story to help encourage health professionals to pursue a career here. She has recently returned from a recruitment event at the University of Portsmouth where she spoke to 2nd year Physician Associates about her experiences at Newport Health Centre.
In her day-to-day role, Katie will manage anything from same-day medical urgencies within the health centre to acute or chronic medical problems across two locations within Newport Health Centre – Carisbrooke and Dower House. Always under the supervision of a GP, her work is evenly split between telephone and face to face appointments while she also undertakes some home visits.
Katie came to the Island from the States where she worked in a similar role, albeit in the hospital setting of the 800-bed Maine Medical Centre. Her partner Scott Jones is an Islander and she is already loving life here both inside and outside of work and hopes her positive experience could encourage other health professionals to choose the Island as a place to work and live.
She said: “The health system here is really open to new roles. And at Newport Health Centre that enables us to create a truly multi-dimensional team with a wide scope of expertise and specialities and that can only be good for patient care.
“It puts us at the cutting edge of how primary care is moving forward in this country and I am really proud and excited to be part of that. Our centre is the second largest on the Island in terms of patient numbers and that gives us a wide variety of patients and medical issues to deal with.
Among her day-to day duties - all of which free up GP time to consult with patients - will be taking medical histories from patients, carrying out physical examinations and initial diagnoses, seeing patients with long-term chronic conditions, developing appropriate treatment and management plans, requesting further diagnostic processes such as scans and giving prescriptions - which are co-signed by a registered GP.
The additional role is part of a general expansion of primary care practice teams, both here on the Island and nationally, to improve access to services and help manage the increasing demand for healthcare.
Dr Michele Legg, Island GP and Clinical Director at Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board, said:
“My colleagues at GP practices in primary care across the island work incredibly hard to care for our communities. They are dealing with record numbers of calls and holding record number of appointments.
“We are now also supported by talented teams of health professionals, from physios and mental health practitioners to clinical pharmacists and advanced nurse practitioners. They can often see patients sooner and have specialist expertise which can achieve better outcomes.
“We also have hard-working non-clinical staff who are the backbone of our surgeries, arranging appointments and dealing with thousands of patient calls and enquiries every day.”