GP TechLead

Introduction   As the landscape of general practice continues to evolve, many GPs are exploring portfolio careers, allowing them to diversify their professional experience. One such avenue is occupational health, a field that focuses on the relationship between health and work. Here’s a guide on how you can transition into occupational health as a portfolio GP. 

If you do joint injections, then having a template in EMIS can help speed things up, as well as give useful prompts on what to mention regarding informed consent and recovery. There may be already one on your system but it may not be appropriate to your practice or may not include what you want it to include. Below I'll show you how to create your own Joint Injection template on EMIS which you can customise to how you want it. 

During the Covid-19 lockdown, the NHS was doing some big deals. One such deal was with Microsoft to provide all their staff with Office 365. This includes their email services but also 1TB cloud storage, video-conferencing software and importantly their suite of Office programs. This includes their well known MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more. This was agreed from the 15th June 2020 and will last until April 2023, though hopefully longer.  Those who have used these suite of programs recently may already know, but if you want to use the latest edition of Word, Excel or PowerPoint, you will now need an ongoing subscription. There is no longer a yearly release of these programs that you would purchase as a one-off, now you purchase a Microsoft 365 subscription that will allow you to download the newest edition of these programs. This allows you to use the online, desktop or mobile office apps. Personal subscriptions start at £59.99/year but with this NHS collaboration with Micros...

Previous I discussed the principles of Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) but there is more than one type of FIRE. There is a no one size fits all when it comes to financial independence. 

What is the point of saving? For some it is to buy a house, for others its to buy a nice car or a big holiday. But once you're settled in your living arrangement or there is nothing material to save for, what else should you do with your money? Do you live to work or do you work to live? These deep questions may make you think about the purpose of work and what we really do with our money.

The new to partnership scheme has an attached £3,000 bursary attached to it for new partners. It's meant to teach new partners the non-clinical skills that should serve them well in their new role. It requires you to pay for the course, and then NHS England will pay your practice back on your 1 year anniversary of being a partner. There are several options available that I'm aware of, listed below.

Sometimes in the course of the day as a GP, you may have occasional need to edit a drug chart (like palliative care drug doses) or change a document on EMIS. If you have printed out a drug chart then you could just write on the chart with pen, but you leave no auditable electronic trail. You could recreate the document but that may take up more time, and still may leave the wrong document up on the system. What I think is better is to edit a saved Word document on EMIS, which will leave a audit trail on the patients notes and hopefully minimise wasted time. Below is the process on how to edit a saved MS Word document on the patient notes on EMIS.  Have the patient consultation screen open and click on their documents tab.  On the document / drug chart you need to edit, right click to open up the menu and left click 'Edit'.  On the MS Word screen, do the edits that you need to.  Then click on the File button in the top left of the screen, and click 'Save As'. On the ...

Maternity pay is something I have found quite confusing, especially in the NHS. With a spate of new pregnancies in my friendship group, I thought it'd be something I'd revisit. I find it easier to think of it as weeks in the pregnancy so you will notice the fractions, which mean the week of the pregnancy (10th week of pregnancy is equal to 10/40) - hope that makes sense. Also bare in mind this is the standard NHS / BMA maternity leave, if you are employed by a GP surgery then depending on your contract, it may differ from what is down below. 

I recently published my first Flutter app, and one of the hard parts as a newbie was signing and  creating the app bundle from Android studio. There is a good link here walking you through it but it didn't help with the details if you were having any issues. Here is my walkthrough on how to do create your app bundle and what to do if you had issues like me. This walkthrough is applicable to Windows. Once you're happy with your app and created a nice app icon, you're ready to sign it.  Copy and paste this command into the terminal, replacing USER_NAME with your particular username. This will create a key file. You do not need to store the key in that particular folder but just for ease of use and for finding it later. keytool -genkey -v -keystore c:\Users\USER_NAME\key.jks -storetype JKS -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000 -alias key   Now for me, when I input that command, it did not recognise keytool as a command. The way I fixed it was to download the new...

There is a useful shortcut to allow you to prepare pieces of text in advance when writing consultations. This can speed up typing up your notes, especially if you normally usually repeat the same information to the patient. In the consultation tab, go to CR config button found above.  Select the 'Quick codes and text' tab on the menu that pops up. Press the 'Add..' button.

Inside EMIS there are very basic macro functions you can do to help speed things up. I'll go through a very basic one which may help you speed up certain tasks and procedures. First of all, go to the top right-hand corner of EMIS where you can find the menu button. Click on the EMIS logo and go to Configuration -> Template Manager.

Following on from my guide on how to install EMIS at home , here is a short guide on how to install other useful programs on your home computer. Best to be on the VPN when installing and running these programs. AccuRx Download and  Install AccuRx installer from here . Log in with normal password, should just work as normal.If not, you can follow the guide here . You will need to open it when you have EMIS open for it to sync with your selected patient. Alternatively you can use the standalone web site which has all the features in the browser - Fleming . However if is a bit more time consuming and it also doesn't save into the notes automatically nor automatically select the correct patient. 

With Covid19, we're trying to reduce footfall into the surgery and trying to send things out to patients. Sick notes are a big administrative reason why patient's come into the surgery. One way of reducing foot-fall is send them the sick notes electronically.  Here is a guide on how to sign and send sick notes electronically on Emis Web but the same will apply to most patient management software like Vision and System1.  Creating the Sick Note Once inside the patient's record, create your sick note as you normal would. Before you print, you must press 'Preview'. When it comes to printing, change the printer to 'Print to PDF' which is an option in Windows 10. If you don't have this option, you will have to install another Print to PDF option, I recommend  Cute PDF  which does this as well and is easy to set up.  The reason why you must press preview is that EMIS can crash if you just print it straight away without previewing it first. The preview screen...