Home visits
We are currently experiencing a large rise in requests for home visits. These take up a significant amount of GP time and the equivalent of three patients can be seen in the surgery for the time it takes to do one home visit. Could we please remind patients home visits are only for people who are:
- Palliative
- Completely housebound
- Unwell to the extent they are in bed of unable to mobilise
Anyone who can visit the supermarket, hairdressers or other appointments in the community can attend the GP Practice and are NOT classed as housebound.
For patients meeting the criteria and requiring a home visit please request this before 11am. Please only phone after 11am for a home visit if it is medically urgent and cannot wait until the next working day.
Yours help and understanding is appreciated.
Doctors Appointments
Can we please remind all patients that you will need to phone in for appointments with the doctor – we cannot accept patients who walk-in to the practice as this is not our procedure and patients will be asked to leave and return home to call the practice for an appointment as the doctors will be seeing the patients already booked in with them.
The ONLY exclusion to the above will be MEDICAL EMERGENCIES – when a patient turns up to the practice and is extremely unwell we will not turn them away.
We have extra staff working on the phones every morning to ensure that ALL calls are answered as quickly as possible. Once we reach capacity for appointments for the day it is NOT SAFE for GPs to take on any more calls, as we will not have the capacity for safely reviewing the patient and in this situation the doctors will be instructing the reception staff to inform you to phone the following day to deal with the problem appropriately.
Any calls that are received after we have reached capacity that are not deemed a medical emergency will not receive a call back.
Appointments for the nurses and other health professionals can be booked over the phone but we would ask that you avoid phoning for these appointments between 8.30-11.00am each morning as it is the busiest time for the phones.
Many thanks for your co-operation.
Prescriptions
Gentle reminder! It can take up to 7 working days for the pharmacy to have your medication ready for collection – so please do not contact the practice until 7 days have passed since ordering medication. To avoid missing any medications, we would encourage you to please allow enough time when ordering your medication.