ST BEDE MEDICAL CENTRE
Zero Tolerance
St Bede Medical Centre supports the NHS Zero Tolerance campaign. This states that GPs and their staff have a right to care for others without fear of being attacked or abused.
To successfully provide these services a mutual respect between all the staff and patients has to be in place. All our staff aim to be polite, helpful, and sensitive to all patients’ individual needs and circumstances.
In order for the practice to maintain good relationships with our patients the practice would like to ask all patients to read and take note of the types of behaviour that would be found to be unacceptable:
- Using bad language, shouting or swearing at practice staff
- Any physical violence towards any member of the Primary Health Care Team or other patients
- Verbal abuse towards the staff in any form including verbally insulting the staff
- Racial abuse and sexual harassment will not be tolerated
- Causing damage/stealing from the Practice’s premises, staff or patients
- Obtaining drugs and/or medical services fraudulently.
We ask you to treat your GPs and their staff courteously at all times.
All incidents will be followed up, however, aggressive behaviour, be it violent or abusive, will not be tolerated and may result in you being removed from the Practice list, and in extreme cases, the Police being contacted.
Removal From the Practice List
A good patient-doctor relationship, based on mutual respect and trust, is the cornerstone of good patient care. The removal of patients from our list is an exceptional and rare event and is a last resort in an impaired patient-practice relationship. When trust has broken down it is in the patient’s interest just as much as that of the practice, that they should find a new practice. An exception to this is on immediate removal on the grounds of violence eg when the Police are involved.
Removing Other Members of the Household
In rare cases, however, because of the possible need to visit patients at home it may be necessary to terminate responsibility for other members of the family or the entire household. The prospect of visiting patients where a relative who is no longer a patient of the practice by virtue of their unacceptable behaviour resides, or being regularly confronted by the removed patient, may make it too difficult for the practice to continue to look after the whole family.
This is particularly likely where the patient has been removed because of violence or threatening behaviour and keeping the other family members could put doctors or their staff at risk.