Appointments

Making an Appointment

When you contact the surgery for an appointment the receptionist will ask you the reason you wish to be seen this is to enable them to offer you an appointment with the most appropriate member of the practice team.

There are four types of appointments:

• NEW - for problems you have not spoken to the doctor or nurse about before.
• REVIEW - to look at something that you are already having treatment for.
• TRIAGE - which only a GP can allocate after consideration of the problem. 

New appointments will be available within 48 hours of asking for one.

Review appointments will be available up to 1 month from the request, though we expect that this will be just a few days if you are seeing one of the full time doctors and none of them are on leave.

Appointments are either 10 or 15 minutes long. Please request a longer appointment for new patients, smear or something likely to exceed the time allowed.

Please understand when surgeries run late. The doctor may have to attend an emergency and peoples problems are not predictable.

We run a shared list which means you each have a named GP on your record and the same doctors name will appear on correspondence. Feel free to see who you wish, as your named GP is mainly for administrative purposes.

Please be honest about your need for an appointment so that serious problems like chest pain / asthma /sick baby, are seen speedily. Less urgent problems may have to wait.

Let the receptionist know if you feel unwell in the waiting area.

Home Visits

Take up a period of GP time equivalent to at least three appointments so are for people too ill or infirm to leave home. Please phone before 10.00am if possible. See additional page for EMERGENCIES.

When you ring to request a house call the receptionist will ask you for your contact details and a doctor will be in touch with you to discuss the problem.

Test Results

Having seen one of our clinicians for a blood or other test, the samples are sent to the laboratories for analysis.  The results of your test sample are then reported back to the Practice for the necessary clinician to review.

It is the patient's responsibility to check their results and to make any required follow-up appointments.  When you telephone for your results, please do so between 14.00 and 17.30, when a member of staff will provide you, if available, with your result and advise you of any further action you may need to take.  Our reception staff are not qualified to comment on results that have not been considered by our clinical team.

Please allow 48 hours before phoning for a routine blood or urine result.  Warfarin patients are requested to phone 24 hours after their INR blood test for their result.  X-Ray and scan results can take approximately 10-14 days to be reported back, please allow this period of time to pass before phoning for your result.

You can find out more information regarding blood tests and x-ray tests, their purpose and the way they are carried out by visiting the NHS Inform Website.

Please also note that, adhering to our policy regarding Data Protection and Patient Confidentiality, we will only give out test results to the person they relate to, unless we have prior consent for their release to another, or if that person is not capable of understanding the result.