The Practice offers a very wide range of appointments and has a number of doctors for you to see. Every effort is made to see emergency cases the same day and for routine appointments to be available at the earliest possible time.

Sometimes you will not be able to see the doctor of your choice at the time you want if the doctor is away or already fully booked. On these occasions you are welcome to make an appointment with another doctor.

Please let us know as soon as possible if you do not require an appointment you booked, so that the time can be used for another patient.

Demand for appointments always exceeds supply and we have developed our telephone access and appointments systems to improve services and meet our access targets set by the Department of Health.

How to Make an Appointment

Please make an appointment by visiting our Consulting Room.

Our Appointment System

The appointment types that we have are:

Urgent

For patients who need to be assessed or seen the same day. Patients will be seen or contacted by our on-call triage team.

When you telephone the surgery, and you require urgent treatment, we will offer you a triage appointment where a duty on-call clinician will telephone you at home and discuss your symptoms with you. From this discussion the clinician may be able to help you by issuing medication for you to collect at a local chemist or they may decide you should be seen for a face to face consultation.

Please note that we do not offer a walk-in service for urgent treatment. This is because we cannot guarantee a time that you will be seen by our on-call GP as they may be making an emergency home visit or dealing with urgent patients already on our triage list.

We also have a duty of care to our patients in the waiting room; it may be that you have an infectious/contagious disease and we must follow set guidelines to quarantine patients, so please stay at home and call us for advice.

Routine Appointments

Suitable for those patients with non-urgent needs or those requiring on-going treatment. These appointments are available to book up to four weeks in advance either by using our online services or by calling into the surgery.

If you do not require an urgent, same day appointment, we would be grateful if you therefore do not phone or call into the surgery until after 12:30. This will enable urgent appointment requests only to be dealt with in the morning, and therefore spread demand on our telephone system more evenly throughout the day which should, in turn, hopefully reduce the waiting time for phone calls to be answered during peak periods.

Same Day

We do not offer routine appointments on the same day – these are held for urgent/emergency bookings.

If you feel you need to be seen the same day please speak to reception – you will be asked for brief details about your symptoms (please note all practice staff are bound by patient confidentiality).

You may be offered a telephone triage in the first instance and the doctor or nurse practitioner will call you and possibly ask you to come to the surgery. For very severe symptoms we would offer you an emergency appointment straight away.

Alternatively, you may be asked to come to the surgery and sit and wait for the duty doctor. Please note urgent/emergency appointments are offered for the time frame that you call in. E.g. if you call in the morning we are unable to offer you an urgent appointment in the afternoon.

Speak to a Doctor

You can speak to a doctor as an emergency triage as detailed above or a planned telephone consultation.

Booked Telephone Consultations

Sometimes you may want to speak to your doctor, but not necessarily see them. You can book an appointment for your doctor to ring you during normal surgery hours if you wish. The doctor will have your records in front of them, and it saves you having to come in to the surgery. It may mean that you don’t have to take time off work to visit the surgery.

Nurse or Healthcare Assistant Appointment

Our team of Nurses & Health Care Assistants have many different types of appointments. To arrange an appointment you need to speak to the Reception Team who will know how long each appointment will take and can book the correct amount of time for you.

How to Cancel an Appointment

To cancel an appointment you can either:

• Cancel an appointment online
• Respond to a text reminder (if you have not already signed up for this service – please complete a form at any surgery)
• Call 01452 505879 at any time and leave a message for us, stating the name and date of birth of the person who the appointment is for and who they will be seeing e.g. doctor /nurse.

Please try to give at least 24 hours notice of cancellations to allow us to offer the appointment to another patient.