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Ringing for an appointment

Within the surgery we have a skill-mixed clinical team to deliver a comprehensive, quality and timely service.  Illness may be acute (newly onset) or chronic (ongoing), it may be mild and self-limiting or severe and incapacitating.  Many minor, acute illnesses are best treated using home or over-the-counter remedies and do not require an appointment with the surgery.

When you contact the surgery for an appointment, you will be asked a series of questions:

  • Please give a brief indication of the problem
  • How long have you had it for?
  • Have you already seen anyone about this problem?
  • Have you taken any medication to help treat the problem?

These questions have been set and approved by our GP's to enable you to be seen by the most appropriate clinician within the best time-scale. These questions are not compulsory and you only need to go into as much detail as you feel comfortable. All communication between ourselves and our patients is always dealt with in the strictest confidentiality.

Our aim is to help support our patients:

  • Treat minor, acute conditions themselves without having to come to the surgery
  • See and treat significant new acute conditions quickly
  • Ensure patients are seen by specialist nurses  for a range of problems including; family planning, sexual health, diabetes, asthma etc
  • Maintain continuity with a single clinician for ongoing complex conditions

Our standard GP appointment length is 10 minutes

● This is in line with common practice throughout the NHS.
● In most cases, we will be able to deal with only one problem during this 10 minute appointment.

What to do if you have more than one problem

● You can book double-appointments if you have a second problem you’d like to discuss.
● Please be prepared to be asked to make an additional appointment if the GP feels unable to deal with your problem safely within the allocated appointment.

Please help us to help all our patients

● The GP has to balance caring for you as an individual patient with all the other patients who need to be seen.
● Having to deal with more than one problem in 10 minutes can mean that the GP is not able to give each of your problems the careful attention they require and may not enable them to help you as much as they’d like to.
● Please be patient if your GP is late - it usually means they’ve been working hard dealing with sick patients with urgent problems that cannot wait and require more time to care for.
● We have to balance our patients’ needs, so by limiting appointments to 10 minutes means we can offer more appointments to more patients.
