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Look Who’s Talking: Matthew Wright
Matthew Wright is the General Manager of First Practice Management (FPM) Group, an award-winning company that provides the highest quality practice management support, software and consultancy services to primary care across the UK. A new partnership between FPM and Blue Stream Academy has recently been announced which will enable users to link compliance and policies at the touch of a button.
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he advantage of working with FPM is that many of us have already worked in primary care, whether in technology, practice management or the wider NHS. This means we can appreciate first-hand the pressures being experienced by our members.
Matthew Wright www.firstpracticemanagement.co.uk Matthew is an accomplished technology executive who has worked for over 25 years with mainly Primary Care Technology businesses. He has wide ranging experience in Primary Healthcare, and has also worked in the Legal, Charity and Manufacturing sectors. Matthew is currently the General Manager of the FPM Group which includes the First Practice Management, My Surgery Website and Thornfields companies. His previous executive positions include founder and Director of Egton, and Head of Support at EMIS. In between these roles he provided consultancy and support services to small and medium sized businesses around Yorkshire. Matthew earned a B Eng (Hons) in Electronic, Computer and Communications Engineering from Bradford University.
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The first FPM website was created in the mid-nineties by Ray Wilcox, a Practice Manager based in Norwich. The website made available a small library of policies, a frequently asked questions section and a list of helpful links for practice managers for an annual fee. We have always continued with the original aim – to support busy managers in the running of their practice business so they have the information and tools they need to run a safe and compliant service for their patients. In 2003 Ray joined forces with Tim Marlton, an experienced employment lawyer, to set up FPM. Their aim was to provide recruitment and staff training services and a discussion forum for practice managers throughout the UK. We built on that with the FPM weekly bulletin, an HR helpline as well as practice recruitment and consultancy services. Over the years we’ve welcomed software applications and face-toface training services into the product portfolio too.
Stericycle acquired the business in 2008 and FPM Group has continued to grow since then, with FPM winning IT Provider of the Year at the General Practice Awards in 2015, and Thornfields winning Education Provider of the Year at the 2016 and 2017 GP Awards. Today we offer recruitment and management consultancy, HR and Care Quality Commission (CQC) advice, an extensive library of policies and procedures, primary care training, and website services (My Surgery Website). All together, we support more than 7,000 practices across the UK. Practice managers have told us in our annual FPM Practice Manager Salary Surveys that they are in “a generally under-appreciated position”; extra workload, expectations from partners to fix everything at any time of the day (or night, or weekend) and the additional work for health boards, clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) or primary care networks (PCNs) all add to an increasing to-do list for our practice managers. We’re pleased that people look to us as ‘thought leaders’, so we have a responsibility to inform our communities to keep them up to date and be aware of what’s just around the corner. We have been approached by bodies such as NHS England, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and the
