I hate meetings.

We have a monthly meeting in our practice.

It’s awful.

An ego trip for the practice manager.

It’s boring and pointless. I get frustrated and so am not my best self when the few subjects that I do care about come up on the agenda.

Everyone else seems to manage to zone out. I find that impossible without making it obvious by fiddling on my phone.

The partners hate it too, but they’re too chicken to do anything about it.

WWSTD?

Once a month? Dry your eyes. My entire day, every day, is basically meetings.

On a Monday afternoon we have a prep meeting for the meeting were going to have on Tuesday morning. It’s the same meeting every week.

Next time, in the meeting, be brave and say out loud ‘this isnt working for me, and i dont think its working for other team members either, its not a productive use of our time’…….

Watch the sighs of relief come over other peoples faces.

Then sit back and enjoy 😀

Thatll get you out of this meeting, but the question will come up as to whats the new meeting/forum/tool to discuss open points….

How long does the meeting last? Someone finds it useful.

I rarely go to meetings but when I do I usually make a fool of myself. Maybe that’s why I don’t get invited to meetings very often?!

For some meetings we have a meeting to agree the agenda. Then a pre-meeting to agree who is going to say what (largely to stop the chair saying anything daft). And then we have the meeting. And then we have a debrief meeting.

Thankfully that’s not for every meeting. But it’s not uncommon. Welcome to local government.

Aren’t the GP partners the Practice Managers boss?

Tell the manager to wind their neck in! 🙂

Suggest having the meeting standing up. If they don’t agree stand up anyhow.

Can you reschedule it to an hour shortly after lunch? Then you simply fall asleep after 15 mins of unengaging drone. It’s what I do!

Are you a partner in the practice? If so does the practice manager report to the owners? Should be able to resolve the issue that way.

BTW, is the practice manager an ex receptionist that’s worked their way up? Now you know how we all feel phoning to make an appointment!

It is possible to decline meeting invites.

Have the meeting standing up. No chairs in the room.

There must be medicines you could take/administer to liven thing up a bit?

I humbly suggest that the reason there are so many meetings in the modern business environment is because managers don’t want to, or can’t, do their actual jobs, i.e. managing. Meetings are their safe place.

It is possible to decline meeting invites.

It’s compulsory.

Aren’t the GP partners the Practice Managers boss?

She’s been there longer than any of them and they’re scared of her.

@BoardinBob – you have my sympathy. I’m lucky to have a job that I (mostly) enjoy and that feels like I achieve something meaningful.

She’s been there longer than any of them and they’re scared of her.

Can they slip something into her tea to make her doze off!?  🙂

It’s compulsory

but aren’t you a partner? Someone you employ is making something you don’t want (and the other partners don’t want)

mandatory…… nah, no thanks.

but i do have some insight & thoughts on the whole GP thing, as my missus is a dr and was a partner previously. You all go to uni and med school to be doctors. At no point does training include management or business ownership or finance. Then we/you/government/the general public etc wonder why doctor’s don’t “know” how to run the business side of the surgery.

You think that’s bad, i have monthly meetings every week!

@oldschool

but aren’t you a partner?

No I’m not. I’m a salaried GP.

Then we/you/government/the general public etc wonder why doctor’s don’t “know” how to run the business side of the surgery.

However the evidence shows that we do it better than the hospitals which do have professional business management?

I ran my business with up to 9 employees for 10 years and never had a meeting. I worked for a year in a language school in Barcelona that never had a meeting either. At the other extreme a boss hardly ever sent out memos or wrote anything down so did it all in meetings and expected instant feedback – that worked well too. If the meetings are useful I don’t see the problem, if they achieve nothing buy a paper copy of the Beano/Morning Star/Guardian and read that, standing up until your turn..

It depends with a subset of my colleagues it was possible to have a quick focused meeting, make sensible decisions add in a few more people who liked the sound of their own voices and they could last for hours.

If the meeting were on line I used to plan bike routes on my second screen.

Meetings – the practical alternative to work

Been in many a practice meeting where you find yourself sat there feeling resentful of the time its taking and thinking of all the jobs you could actually have achieved in that time (or more likely thinking how late am I going to have to stay to catch up!)

I guess starting point would be what does the meeting aim to actually achieve? Many of these meetings are just information dissemination and it could be and should be done another way. If its actually making decisions then need to review who actually needs to be there (may be different for each meeting)

You need a good chair who drives it on and doesn’t allow agenda points to get sidetracked. I imagine GPs are as good at this as vets are (want 4 opinions then ask 3 vets). If that’s not the PM then someone else has to take over that role.

They also need to review the agenda beforehand and decide if it should actually be on there or is it just information dissemination in which case it’s not getting on the agenda.

Action Points checked before the meeting so you don’t get sidetracked agreeing the previous minutes before you even get to the current agenda.

Only way it will change is if someone actually stands up and states it isn’t working and need to review it. Guess one of the partners needs to be that person though.

At least its only once a month though 😉

I’ve got one of my monthlies coming up on Thursday, it’s the one that’s always the full 2.5 hour argument, i just bring my laptop in and do work whilst they’re arguing semantics.

Another one i go to is actually really good, lots of decent people discussing trends, themes, etc and trying to either gain some insight, or provide it, they’re not all bad.

If you think you’re going to run anything without monthly meetings to organise stuff you’re in la la land.

Suggestion 1 – suggest a better agenda.  If you can’t,  then shut up till you can  – moaning without a solution is just noise.

2. The problem is that If you really want to do something in them monthly is too infrequent.  If its only monthly it ain’t really important (!at least for details)

Our manager is off so I chaired the weekly team meeting – 11 minutes, done. Usually 1.5 hours.

Admittedly I hadn’t got any feedback/bollocks from the preceding management meeting.

Suggestion 1 – suggest a better agenda.  If you can’t,  then shut up till you can  – moaning without a solution is just noise.

I can, and I have. It’s been nixed. As said previously the partners are too scared of the likely fallout to do anything about it.

I think that part of the problem is that the meeting is held in the protected learning time, and the practice manager hates the thought that people might get off early.

So you’re a salaried gp and not a partner. As a lowly employee why do you have to attend. Surely meeting happens, things get decided. You are told what to do. Meeting avoided.

I don’t mind focused, proper meetings. Ones where people leave in a better position than they were beforehand.

If, for example, I know there’s a shitload of work coming my way, but it could be an infinite amount if people don’t clarify what they want. All parties leave with more certainty than they began with – if it ends naturally before the scheduled end time, then everyone just **** off to get on with the actual doing.

But, I despise the other kind. The ‘for the sake of it’ bollocks. Because:

1. A few needy staff need to feel cuddly.

2. Managers don’t trust their staff without giving them a pep talk.

3. Some people just need an audience.

Etc.

Work is work. I don’t need to feel bouncy about it. I need the info and requirements to get (and for my employer to get) the best out of my time. I’m satisfied if I do a good job on something. I have enough professional pride to want to do stuff well. But I’m not obsessed by it and I’m not putting my heart and soul into it – and it is not going to dominate my life via my mood.

I’ve been there twice before, and I’m not going down that road again for anyone. 🙂

@onehundredthidiot apparently because I’m paid to be there and there’s very important information to be disseminated.

As mentioned it’s an ego trip for the practice manager, and she can’t stand the fact that people might be slacking off.

Oh, I forgot my worst ever type of meeting.

The ones where they’ve brought in outside “consultants” who are helping us in a “collaborative learning exercise” to which they’ve applied a predetermined agenda.

The most recent one where they wanted to unveil their (crap, wishy washy) mission statement for the organisation.

I have attended good and bad meetings.

Good meetings only need to last for 15 to 30 mins maximum.

Bad meetings can last for more than an hour on Saturday (when I was working in the far east).

My wife is a GP and a few years ago I helped her practice with a review of business processes. When it came to practice meetings, which they all complained bitterly about, I got them to change the meeting duration to multiples of 12 minutes which was, at the time, the length of each patient consultation. It really worked for GP mentality and they soon adjusted the weekly meeting down to 2×12 mins

BTW I’ve suggested standing meetings.

It’s rare I agree with @chewkw but any meeting longer than 30 minutes needs a bit of looking at. It’s probably not really a meeting, it’s a couple of people who need to work on something together who have accidentally involved lots of people who don’t need to be there – or it’s just complete bobbins.
There are occasional exceptions.

BTW I’ve suggested standing meetings.

Go one better and suggest a walking meeting. That way you get some exercise and fresh air and can always stop or walk off if you’ve had enough.

Refuse to go ” sorry i am too busy to attend”   i have done this and when i got pushback i quoted tbe nmc code at senior management ( 3 levels above me) and asked tbem to put it in writing that i should leave the patients to attend the meeting.   I never went to another one.

Or play buzzword bingo.

We have loads of pointless meetings now, I’m really not sure how anyone gets any actual work done. The worst ones are weekly round table catch-ups where everyone says what they’re working on. The only people who care and need to know about what I’m working on already know, because we’re working together, and vice versa. It used to be a fun place to work before all this kind of stuff came into it, it has really sucked all the joy out of what should be a great job.

weekly round table catch-ups where everyone says what they’re working on. The only people who care and need to know about what I’m working on already know, because we’re working together, and vice versa

We have these, they’re okay until the more enthusiastic amongst us start giving chapter and verse.

But yeah, those who need to know already do.