Di Woods

Di is our QOF and Additional Services Manager

Di Woods is our QOF and Additional Services Manager, a new role which helps all our sites to attain their Quality and Outcomes Framework measures. QOF is a voluntary annual reward and incentive programme for all GP practices in England with different workstreams. The QOF rewards GP practices with points based on the quality of care they provide to patients. Earning points indicates that patients are receiving high-quality, effective healthcare.

Di supports all eight QOF teams from our sites and she and Vicky Ward, Head of Nursing and Allied Health Professionals, and Jess Lilley, Lakeside’s Quality and Compliance Officer, hold quarterly meetings around QOF and Long Term Conditions. They share ideas, discuss issues, provide strategic oversight and practical support to identify key areas for improvement, helping teams focus their efforts where they will have the greatest impact.

She said ‘The meetings are to make sure that all the QOF teams were working the same way, learning from each other, optimizing the way they work and refining the searching and reporting process. I can run reports remotely on their data across all our practices. It is very interesting as you can drill down into the data to see how differently all eight sites work. I don’t have any intention to change their way of working, I just want to support them attaining their QOF targets.’

Di has been at Lakeside for nearly 20 years, having first joined the Hereward Practice on a work experience placement! On leaving school she joined full-time in administration and eventually became Assistant Practice Manager. She wanted a change in career focus and so started a secondment at Lakeside’s Central Team as Information and Transformation Support Officer working on projects including the installation of health kiosks at each practice. She started her new role early this year, which means that she visits sites, building rapport and learning how each sites operates.

She said: ‘Having a close working relationship with the site teams allows us to tailor strategies to their specific needs. I am always sending out top tips – like if you start working on these areas at this time it will support you and you’ve not got that mad rush at the end of the year. It is pointing them in the right direction. The sites are used to being on the ball themselves, and now they are getting used to the fact that they can just reach out to me and say, can you give us a hand or support us with this? Quite a few of the GP Partners have reached out saying “this year we need to concentrate on this demographic, so how do we pull together details?”

‘The QOF quarterly meetings are quite informal, we go through how people are doing and ask if anyone has any areas they are struggling with. We also make sure everyone is up to date with the new BMA guidance and any new changes. It is about making sure we have the right patients on the right registers. Hopefully, with my support, creating different reports should be easier. I am really enjoying it and I work at the Central Team one day a week which is useful as Vicky Ward has been very supportive from a clinical view because sometimes people’s queries do need clinical input and she has been great with that. It is about targeting the right patients in each clinical group, making the most of our resources and capacity.’

Published: Jul 29, 2025