“Our community has really supported us, so that we are able to continue to support them, which is incredibly important.” – Dr Emma Watts, Shere Surgery & Dispensary

When it comes to quintessential English villages, it’s hard to find a more beautiful location than Shere in Surrey. Based between the towns of Dorking and Guildford, Shere is a small village with an abundance of historic buildings and is also famed for being the set location for many popular films, including The Holiday and Bridget Jones Diary: The Edge of Reason.

But movies and famous casts aside, Shere and local villages' population of just over 8,000 residents  have all of their healthcare needs provided for by PSUK member, Shere Surgery & Dispensary.

GP Partner, Dr. Emma Watts, has been at the surgery for 16 years and began her career as a Forensic Psychiatrist. Missing both the Medicine and dealing with patients from a holistic point of view, Emma decided that General Practice was the step forward she wanted to take in her career. Originally based in London, Emma decided to move to the picturesque countryside when she had her children and began working at Shere Surgery & Dispensary.

Emma said that the surgery have been a PSUK member since she joined, and although they have investigated other membership organisations, they felt that remaining with the largest dispensing doctor organisation in the UK would add the most value to their business.

“Our relationship with PSUK has always been strong, but since the pandemic and particularly since October last year when the sudden drop in Dispensing Fees shook our business model, it has become even stronger. Due to Brexit and the pandemic, nationally everybody has had problems with accessing medications, dealing with parallel importing and obtaining adequate stock of medicine on site. Thanks to our fantastic relationship with PSUK, and our Dispensing Doctor Account Manager Lois, we have felt extremely supported through these challenging times.”

Working as a multi-disciplinary team, the Dispensary Management Team involves Emma as Lead Dispensary GP, Sharyn Mackay (Dispensary Manager), Megan Morgan (Systems Analyst), Charlie Wildman (Dispensary Technician-Systems).  Along with Lois, they all worked together during that challenging period and created spreadsheets to track spend to manage problem areas. 

Emma explained they found themselves engaging with Lois on a more regular basis to get support with loss leaders, accessing sought after medications and help with thinking more creatively in what they could prescribe and where they could access discounts. Lois was able to engage with the group during their monthly meetings, thinking laterally as a group to create solutions.  Megan's spreadsheets allow them to see all the decisions that they have made over the last year, enabling them to scrutinise trends and costings.

“The dispensing fee being slashed by 24% in October 2021 came at a time where our prescribing numbers were going up due to secondary care backlog.  We were dispensing 11,000 prescriptions per month and our per item fee was going down, this was a huge struggle for us from a business perspective as the dispensing fee is supposed to create stability of income for staff salaries.  It was extremely important that we were able to do something to sustain the business, and Lois worked really hard with us to ensure we reduced our costs and stabilised our income.”

As well as the team working with Lois to ensure the surgery remained business viable; Emma also cited how they had to look at their day-to-day workings.  Like many businesses, there were times when her staff were off sick due to COVID and other members of staff were having to work overtime to cover.

“Lois was able to renegotiate our delivery time from mid-morning to 8am, which is brilliant as it gives the dispensing team longer to crack on with workload and save time throughout the day. Again, this was just another small practical tweak that PSUK were able to support with that has made the world of difference for us.”

The Surrey Hills are rural, with no public transport links, hence why Shere Surgery & Dispensary plays a vital role in providing healthcare to their community.  Without them their patients would not be able to receive their regular or emergency medication as well as many other services.

“We are really, really important to our community from a prescribing perspective, and we are incredibly lucky that our community realises the importance of the surgery and the strain that we are under. Where we have had problems recruiting staff due to the pandemic, the community pulled together to run a fundraising campaign to get ‘Brenda the Vendor’ (Pharmaself24UK), our pharmacy dispensing machine put in place so that patients are able to access their prescriptions 24/7.”

This robot has been revolutionary for the surgery with the ability to conveniently dispense up to 750 prescriptions per week.  The convenience speaks for itself, with 52 patients choosing to pick up their prescriptions on Christmas Day!

“Our community has really supported us, so that we are able to continue to support them, which is incredibly important.”

Emma described how, being rural, it is important that they offer a wider range of services than urban GP practices, such as ultrasound, minor surgery and microsuction, and that their community is appreciative and supportive of them going the extra mile. Therefore, Shere have an active Patient Participation Group (SALV) who led the fundraising for their Pharmaself24UK.

“We also present educational evening presentations to the community, which we hold twice a year in a village hall, where we talk about a subject of their choosing.  Those evenings are really good as the patients get to know more about the services we provide, why we provide them and why we are passionate about it.”

“We have a great relationship with them and when we explained the problems we were having at the start of the pandemic with recruitment, waiting times for prescriptions and the fact that we couldn’t have patients at two metre distance down the pavement outside, it was very easy for us to go to the Patient Participation Group with the proposal of Pharmaself24UK as a potential solution. They organised an incredible fundraising campaign. We are incredibly lucky to have such a supportive community.”