Appointment System
How our appointment system works
As a Practice we provide, on average, 300 appointments to see a doctor every week. Most of these take place within the surgery with a small number of home visits taking place each day. The Practice employs a very highly skilled nursing team who also offer approximately 400 appointments each week and are able to deal with many issues that would traditionally have been dealt with by a doctor. This helps to relieve some of the pressure from doctor appointments.
The vast majority of appointments booked by patients are for ongoing issues and therefore booked anywhere from a few days to a few weeks in advance. Approximately 80% of appointments are booked in this way. The remaining 20% are kept for acute or urgent need. This need is assessed by the patient themselves not the Practice staff so if a patient feels their condition requires that they are seen the same day they will always be seen that day. Urgent appointments are kept unbookable until the same day to allow patients who need them to have access to them and are released at 8:30am for morning appointments and 3pm for afternoon appointments.
Wherever possible we will try to give patients access to their doctor of choice. Occasionally due to holidays, busy schedules etc this may not be possible within a time scale that the patient feels is appropriate for their need. In that instance they will be offered an alternative clinician.
There are obviously a finite number of clinical hours available but as a practice we have one of the highest doctor to patient ratios in the country with just over 1,500 patients to each doctor. In some areas this figure is closer to 3,000 patients per doctor.
We recognise that for some patients it can be very hard to access the surgery during working hours. To help with this situation we have added a doctor led clinic 2 nights per week running from 6:30pm until 8:30pm. These appointments can be booked up to 1 month in advance.
We will always try to accommodate a patient's schedule and book a time and date that suits them. Sometimes this just isn't possible and we do ask that patients are as flexible as possible when it comes to appointment times.
We hope that the above clarifies some of the unique features of our appointment system and that this information will help should you need an appointment in the future.