Look Who’s Talking: Matthew Wright

Article by Matthew Wright, General Manager at First Practice Management

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.

The 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.

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-to-face training services into the product portfolio too. Stericycle acquired the business in 2018 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 Parliamentary Ombudsman to help promote and share important information with our practice audiences and create information packs to help them.

We are especially pleased to have been working with the University of Liverpool on a practice management academic guide that will be released this year.

We are proud to offer some of the most innovative products in the marketplace. For example, My Surgery Website not only provides a web presence for surgeries but also delivers tools to help practices fulfil some of their statutory duties, and will always continue to do so.

Our ‘Digital Practice’, with features such as prescription ordering, appointment booking, data collection, online reviews and now our new DOC App feature (which allows patients to send photos to the surgery securely), shows how continuous innovation is bringing benefits to our practices and especially their patients – a good practice website is the modern patient’s first impression of their local GP services.

This is why we are still the largest supplier of websites and intranets to the primary care market and the most successful provider for GP online services in the UK. Our systems deliver the very latest information and interactive services to more than 10 million NHS patients and nearly 2 million prescription items are ordered through our websites every month.

I am very proud of the recognition we have received – we’ve been presented with a General Practice Award for IT Provider of the Year for our FPM team, and Thornfields has won Training Provider of the Year for two consecutive years. These were voted for by our industry peers, which shows that we delivered the right mix of skills and services to practices and that our work has made a real difference to our customers, who can be confident that we know primary care.

Thornfields has delivered training to thousands of clients, ranging from single-hand GP practices and federations to local medical committees (LMCs), CCGs and health boards throughout the UK. In 2018, we delivered 955 courses to 380 organisations, including NHS England, NHS Scotland, and Scottish and Welsh health boards.

As an accredited leadership training centre, we have a dedicated team of specialist trainers who deliver courses accredited by the Institute of Leadership & Management, each focused on the challenges we know that leaders and managers face on a daily basis. In the highly pressured world of the NHS, leaders must satisfy the needs of a range of stakeholders. Our experts help delegates build skills in leadership, management and coaching, as well as helping them to explore innovation, change, partnership and practice finance.

Our new FPM Core online Document Management System is a web-based compliance platform that combines all of our policies and procedures in one place. It allows you to distribute compliant documents to your teams and gives you the ability to report on their uptake.

We’ve worked with our customers to make this intuitive so that they can have the policies they trust in an easy-to-use system. This will help to standardise policies and protocols at a practice, CCG and PCN level, facilitating working at scale across different locations and keeping you compliant with CQC inspection requirements.

Both organisations are passionate about primary care and know just how critical it is that practices across the country get the best value for money.

I am excited about our plans for 2020 and beyond, as we build on our achievements from last year. At the forefront of our strategy is retaining the viewpoint of our founders, which is to provide the very best help and advice to practices that there is, bar none.

In particular, we’re really excited about working with Blue Stream Academy, as we have similar aims to provide a quality service with the right support.

Both organisations are passionate about primary care and know just how critical it is that practices across the country get the best value for money.

With our respective experience, product ranges and commitment to quality, we’re looking forward to creating a strong connection that provides complete support for hard-working practice communities.

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.