Making an appointment
Our practice has an on the day appointment system, which has been in place since 5th March 2018. There will no longer be any appointments available for booking in advance.
You will need to contact the surgery between 8.00am and 11.00am on the day you wish to be seen, whether this is for an urgent or a routine matter.
You will be asked by the receptionist to provide a brief indication of why you are calling. The receptionist will inform you that one of our clinicians will ring you back to discuss your call, and that you should be available to take a telephone call from the clinician. The clinician you speak to on the telephone will decide on a course of action.
You should inform the receptionist if there are any specific times you will not be available to take a call. Please note that the telephone number we call you from may be a 'withheld' number. Please do not ignore this call as we will only make one further attempt to call you again.
Please consider whether you can manage your health in other ways, and please be patient with us and our staff if we can't always give you everything you need at the time you need it. We are doing our best, and can do no more.
Urgent Appointments
For an appointment for the same day, you will need to contact us when the Surgery opens at 8.00am. These same-day appointments are intended primarily for patients with acute problems. We would appreciate your assistance in not booking same-day appointments for non-urgent matters – eg, changes to your medication, review appointments or to discuss results or recent hospital attendances/admissions.
If your need to see a GP is genuinely urgent, we will ensure that you are seen on the same day. Please do not insist on an urgent appointment unless you are in genuine need as you could be preventing a person with a serious condition from seeing the doctor at that time. If you attend without an appointment you may be asked to book one in the normal way, unless you feel your condition justifies immediate medical attention.
For routine matters we cannot guarantee that you will be seen on the same day.
Delays in the surgery may occur if the doctor/nurse has to deal with an urgent or particularly complex problem.
Cancelling an appointment
If you are unable to attend an appointment, please contact the practice to cancel this as soon as possible so that we can use this time for another patient.
Text Message Reminders
As part of our continuous process to improve service to our patients, we use an SMS text messaging service. This means that we can send text messages to your mobile number to remind you of appointments.
In order for us to be able to send you messages, you will need to ensure that we have your most up to date mobile telephone number, and also provide consent in order for us to send messages to your mobile phone.
Please note it is your responsibility to keep your medical records up to date. Therefore, if you change any of the contact details we hold for you it is important to inform us. This includes your mobile telephone number.
If you would like to sign up for text message reminders for appointments please ask at reception.