Patients reported in our last 2 surveys that they wanted to be able to have better online access.   In response we activated  our 'Contact Us' facility on the front page of our website. 

From here patients can submit admin requests (eg requests for sick notes etc,) request repeat medications, or request non-emergency medical assistant.  All these  requests are looked at regularly by our Reception Team  who action or forward the requests to the relevant specialists within the Practice. We hope that patients find this useful and convenient.

We also send out many direct booking links for certain appointment types.  Patients can then use these links to book an appointment in the specific appointment slots without having to call the surgery. We hope this facility is useful and we know many patient have successfully used these and saved the need to call the surgery either in person or on the phone to book these appoinments.

We appeciate that not everyone fully understands the pressure on GP Practices nor the sheer volume of demand for appointments but we do our best to manage this demand.  However, to avoid GPs in particular being inundated with low-level minor ailments such as routine coughs and colds which normally can be mamaged via the home medicine cabinet or over the counter medicines, we do not offer directly bookable GP appointments. 

We ask patients to outline the reason for their appointment so we can direct them to the most appropriate person or service which may not be a GP, but could be another prescriber such as an Advanced Nurse Practitioner or Pharmacist, or a Musculo-skeletal specialist for physio type problems or a mental health specialist - in a modernising health system not everything need to go to a GP when we have other specialists available.

We do need to use the system as efficiently as possible so this is why at the moment we use our reception team (Patient Care Navigators) to direct patients to the most appropriate person and do not provide directly bookable appointments into GP clinics.  

Patients have reported in our last 2 surveys that telephone access has been difficult.  This was not been helped by an ongoing but internittment problem of calls being dissconnected while in the queue. 

We fully understand that the phones are busy at certain times, in particular at 8.00am-9.00am and at teatime.  While we cannot control demand for our services nor with the current delivery model and funding of Primary Care are we likely to be able to fully meet demand, but we do try and provide the best telephone answering service we can. 

Every call we take is different and every person calling has their own requirements and it is not always possible to rattle through telephone calls in very short timescale.  

We hope patients understand that we are not sat idly by watching the phones ring but the staff are working flat out during these peak times and that we do answer the calls as quickly as we can. 

In response to the surveys we have now replaced and upgraded our tepehone system (Jan 24) and  now have a new Cloud Based Telephony System.  This provides the normal call service but with additional features which we hope patients will find useful:  

Appointment Cancellation -

Far too may appointments are wasted through non-attendance without notice, but we understand that some of this waste may have been because telephone lines are busy in the morning when patients may wish to call to cancel.  We now have a telephone voice mailbox just for leaving messages about cancelling appointments.  This does not require patients to wait in a call queue but can just select the appointment cancellation option instead and just leave a message.  We hope patients will find this useful and that this will help free up appointments that would otherwise be wasted by non-attendance.

Call back. 

No-one likes waiting in a queue, especially at busy times such as in the home at the morning school run time etc.  To help reduce the frustration of waiting in a  queue, our new telephone system now provides the option for an automated call back which once selected, permits the caller to put the phone down while still maintaining their position in the call queue.  The system will then automatically callback once the caller reaches No 1 in the queue.  We already know may patients have found this feature useful.  Please be aware though that at peak times, the call queue can be significant and it may take a while to reach No 1 in the queue.