“Making good habits and breaking bad ones will help to protect frontline services”

Health Care Assistants and Assistant Practitioners are well placed to recognise good practice as well as inefficiencies and waste.

The NHS will be facing many new challenges in the foreseeable future. As an Assistant Practitioner working in General Practice, Frontline First has empowered me to look at my own setting and assess how those changes will impact on patient care.

Efficiency in the workplace is important. Making good habits and breaking bad ones will help to protect frontline services and ensure that patients have continued access to the high quality services that we endeavour to deliver.

We can meet challenges by finding smarter and more efficient ways of working. I have been able to take control of my own efficiency by reviewing and restructuring my clinics to ensure that they run as resourcefully and productively as possible.

Collaborating with other members of the multi-disciplinary team is a good way of sharing experiences and ideas. I have been networking within the community and have invited members of the local pharmacy and Sure Start team to come along to our surgery team meetings to interact and contribute ideas to ensure that patient care is not compromised.

HCAs and APs are well placed within the health care setting to identify both excellent and poor standards of practice. I would implore all HCAs and APs to get involved in the Frontline First campaign, to share their stories in meeting the challenges we are all facing and to help shape services for the future.