Tudor Lodge Clinic: responding to patient need

There was a really good report in the Evening Standard yesterday about how the Tudor Lodge Clinic in Victoria Drive is responding to their patients' needs by staying open beyond office hours.

The practice, which serves 6,000 patients in the West Hill area, opens between 8am and 6pm, as well as Saturday mornings. It is soon to extend weekday hours to 7.30pm. As the Clinic Manager Prath Thurairatnam commented: "We open later because it's about patients, not money".

This comment, for me, sums up why the Doctors' Union is pushing an argument they just can't win in opposing the government's plans to be more responsive to patients' needs.

GPs have received a huge pay increase and had the burden of required out-of-hours service lifted from them over the past few years - they deserve it and it was long overdue. But as someone in the area I was talking to the other day said: "illness doesn't keep office hours, and neither should doctors."

For any of us who leave for work before 8am and who don't get home til after 6pm, traditional opening hours simply aren't any use. It's no longer acceptable for doctors to essentially demand of us that we either take half a day of leave to get to see them, or just let our illness or ailment go untreated.

That's why I commend Prath and his team at Tudor Lodge for the excellent service they provide - and I suspect it's one reason why their patient satisfaction score is as high as 98%.

You can read the Evening Standard article here.