Appointments

Routine appointments

If you are unable to use the PATCHS system you can still ring the practice and explain this to the Receptionist who may take some details and relay the issue on for review by someone in our clinical team or may book you a telephone or a face to face appointment.

Surgery Times

The practice is open every weekday  between 8am and 6.30pm.

Urgent Appointments

If the surgery is very busy and all our appointments have been filled but you feel that your problem is urgent for that day the Receptionist will take your details and list them for triage by the doctors.  They will then contact you by telephone to discuss the matter or ask you to come in to be seen that day if necessary.

Cancelling your appointment

We currently lose the equivalent of two surgeries a week through non-attendance and we cannot sustain such levels of loss.   Our surgery is very busy and the demand for appointments is always high.  We do ask that if our patients are unable to attend a booked appointment for any reason they let us know so that we can allocate that time to another patient who needs it.

We have adopted a “Did Not Attend” policy to try to ensure that patients who do not need their appointment once it is booked remember to contact us to let us know.   If you have failed to attend two appointments within a period of a year you will receive a letter from the practice when you miss the second appointment, asking that you please remember to let us know if you no longer need an appointment so it is not wasted.  A third failure to attend will prompt a further reminder letter  and should you still not remember to either keep or cancel your appointment after that we may write to advise that we are removing you from the practice list.  it is not a decision we take lightly, however we do need to ensure that all patients are able to make best use of the services we offer.

Consult with a Doctor online

Our appointment system now has different access methods.    Where possible we encourage our patients to go online and submit a consultation through our PATCHS system.  This entails creating or logging into your PATCHS account, completing a form online to outline the issue, which then gets transmitted to the practice.  As the forms come in during our opening hours, they are reviewed and  allocated to the most relevant member of our Primary Healthcare Team for their action.  This may be a telephone call to you, an email or a text to let you know what action has been taken – for example we may let you know that a prescription has been sent to your pharmacy for collection, or you may be contacted to come in for an appointment.

Home Visits

For our practice Home Visit policy please click here

HOME VISITS ARE MADE AT THE DISCRETION OF THE DOCTORS. Please do not ask the doctor to call unless the patient is genuinely too ill to come to the surgery.

When a home visit is required please try to request the visit before 11.00 am except in an emergency.   The receptionists are told to ask for as much information as possible by the doctors so that requests can be given the necessary priority. It may be that a doctor will ring back to give advice instead of making a visit.   Visits are made at the end of morning surgery.

We now have a team of Paramedics who carry out appropriate Home Visits so it may not be a doctor who comes out to see you.  However the Paramedics work in conjunction with our Doctors and all information from your visit is put into your clinical record held here at the practice.