The surgery offers a blend of pre-bookable face-to-face and telephone appointments with a GP, Advanced Nurse Practitioner during morning and afternoon surgeries. Our reception team are trained Care Navigators who will try to offer you the right type of appointment with the right clinician within an appropriate timeframe, using guidelines designed by our doctors. Please help them do this by giving them a brief description of your problem when you call. If our Care Navigators are unable to offer you a suitable appointment within the guidelines set out by our doctors, they will ask a member of the clinical team for advice and will get back to you.
We offer a selection of pre-bookable appointments with a GP, Advanced Nurse Practitioner or nurse during morning and afternoon surgery. A face-to-face GP appointment is ideal if your problem is a routine ongoing issue, or the doctor may need to examine you, or a telephone consultation is not practical for you. Please appreciate that we are a busy practice and there is great demand for GP appointments at this time, and you may be offered a pre-bookable appointment in 2-4 weeks time.
If you feel you urgently need to be seen on that day, you will need to telephone the surgery during our opening hours between 8.30 am and 6.00pm with your request. The Reception staff will take your details the reason why you want an appointment. This information helps us to prioritise more urgent cases. An appropriate appointment will be offered directly based on initial information or following discussion with health care professional; we have both face to face and telephone consultations available daily. You may be contacted by a health care professional i.e. a nurse or a doctor to discuss your problem at times whereby your call is deemed urgent by our Care Navigators and there are no available slots left for that day, we refer to this as Emergency Triage.
Please make sure that you make the call between as early on in the day as possible. This system has been put in place as there are only a limited number of appointments available during the day, so please use this service appropriately.
Patients who arrive late for their appointment may not be seen and this is at the discretion of the GP.
In life-threatening Emergencies such as severe bleeding, collapse, unconsciousness and severe chest pains telephone 999 immediately.
Some problems can be discussed with the GP over the phone without attending the surgery. Telephone consultations are most appropriate if you need to discuss an ongoing issue, as a follow up to a recent face to face consultation, to review your medication, or to discuss recent results or hospital letters, for example.
Telephone consultation appointments are available to pre-book, although your appointment may not be for 1-3 weeks from the day of booking. We will not be able to give you a specific appointment time, but we will do our best to indicate whether the doctor is likely to call in the morning or afternoon. We would ask that you keep your phone with you until the doctor calls. The doctor will make 3 attempts to call you but if you miss them, it is the same as missing an appointment, and you will need to contact the surgery again to arrange another appointment which may not be for several days.
If you are unable to keep your appointment for any reason, please let us know at the earliest opportunity. This will enable the Reception Staff to offer this appointment to another patient. We are a very busy Practice and it is sometimes very hard to allocate an appointment. This can lead to the frustration for fellow patients who cannot book to see a GP, whilst at the same time, some patients are failing to turn up for appointments they have booked in advance. Did Not Attend appointments are recorded and we monitor DNA rates of Patients. Patients who DNA regularly may be removed from our list.
If you have booked a telephone consultation, the doctor will make 3 attempts 10 minutes apart to contact you on the number you provided at the time of booking. If you miss these calls it is the same as failing to attend a face to face appointment, and you will need to contact the surgery again to rearrange. If you repeatedly miss pre-booked calls from the doctor we may ask you to attend the surgery for your future appointments.
If you would like a chaperone during your consultation, please inform the receptionist at the time of booking your appointment.
Our GPs will provide home visit to genuinely housebound patients, and it would be appreciated if home visit requests could be made by 10:00 hrs, to allow the GP to organise their day.