Booking An Appointment
Our appointment system is a mixture of pre-bookable routine appointments and urgent appointments booked through GP led telephone triage.
If you need to book a routine appointment, then you can book online or through the reception in the usual way.
Should you need to be seen sooner for a more urgent medical problem, then the receptionist will arrange for a GP to call you back. The GP will then discuss your problem over the phone and arrange a face-to-face review if needed, within a clinically appropriate time frame. Some problems will be manageable over the phone, others may need a nurse appointment and others a face-to-face GP consultation. This may not be with your usual GP, but it will be with a GP from our practice who has access to your full medical records.
This responsive system offers availability to cater to many different sections of our patient population. While many practices have removed the ability to pre-book a routine appointment, we recognise that this is valued by the elderly, vulnerable patients and those with chronic disease and long term conditions.
The telephone triage system allows the GP to direct you to the best healthcare professional to manage your problem first time, while at the same time offering the opportunity to try to fit an appointment around work or school.
We now offer standard 15-minute appointments to all over-75s to recognise the increased complexity of many of these consultations.
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Telephone Appointments
Instead of coming to the surgery, you may prefer to deal with simple problems over the phone. Should the problem prove too complex then you may be invited to attend the surgery.
Each doctor has a number of telephone appointments. You can usually speak to your preferred doctor within a day or two. We will take a contact number from you and the doctor will phone you at the agreed time. If you are unable to take the call then please be aware that we are often unable to leave an answerphone message due to potentially breaching patient confidentiality. If you are unable to take the call then please cancel it as you would a standard appointment.
Some of the nursing staff are also consulting by telephone.
Should you have a medically urgent problem and need to speak to a doctor quickly then the Receptionist will ask the duty on-call doctor to phone you back as soon as possible. In order to help assess your problem, you will be asked for a brief description of your symptoms.
Home Visits
Housebound patients, terminally ill and severely ill people may need a home visit. We expect everyone else to attend the surgery. Our practice policy is to minimise the number of home visits performed. We have a large practice area and can quite easily see 5-6 patients in surgery in the time spent travelling to and from a patient's home. We have full access to your medical records at the surgery, better examination facilities, and access to investigations such as ECG.
Should you feel you need a home visit then please call the surgery before 10am. Our receptionist will take some details and a doctor may phone back to discuss further and decide if a visit is warranted.
If The Surgery Is Closed
Out of hours services are provided by the local Clinical Commissioning Group and accessed by phoning 111.
Patients' Responsibilities
To try and ensure that our appointment system runs well we request that you:
- Cancel any appointment that you are unable to attend.
- Arrive on time for your appointment.
- Let us know if you are going to be late.
- Use routine appointments for routine problems.
- Use urgent appointments for urgent problems.
- Remember that your appointment slot is 10 minutes long. This usually allows us to deal with one problem. Please book longer appointments for multiple problems. Please avoid using your appointment to have your repeat prescription issued and signed.