Listening to Feedback from our patients

• Wednesday 8th September 2021

Dear Patients,

We would like to publish a brief update to you all firstly to thank you for the kindness and compassion shown to us throughout the pandemic. We have seen more patients than ever before in the last year and the empathy many of you have shown us has been very much appreciated and reminds us of why we chose our profession in healthcare.

The Pandemic has impacted many people’s mental and physical health and the number of patients needing our help is at an all-time high. We also need to spend more time cleaning between each patient, supply staff to support the hugely successful vaccination campaign and work under the threat of being required to self-isolate ourselves. All of this means that we remain extremely busy. We are continuing our telephone triage system which allows us to help some people over the phone and allows us to ask the necessary screening questions before inviting people in for a face to face appointment. Please be assured that we will always prioritise your safety and see you in person if in doubt.

We have been listening to patient feedback, both formal and informal as well as monitoring our service via other means. We know that the two biggest frustrations patients face are how hard it is to get though on the telephone and the lack of appointments which can be booked in advance.

We appreciate how difficult it can be to get through to us each morning and that many patients face the engaged tone repeatedly before entering our queuing system to speak to a receptionist.

Please, please be assured that our reception team are answering calls as quickly and efficiently as possible and we have additional staff in place at this busy time. Please be kind to our team. We are hoping to improve the queuing capacity on our system to at least give patients an indication as to their position and how long they might be waiting. We also release the same appointments for booking online for those that aren’t able to call us and we have other healthcare professionals who we might be able to direct you to.

We are conscious that the majority of appointments are released each day, a necessity during the height of the pandemic. Whilst our daily demand remains high, it is difficult to transfer our finite capacity ahead to cater for the less urgent problems and the convenience of booking ahead for non-urgent issues. We are aware that this forces people to call each day when they might not need an immediate appointment so we are reviewing how we can safely manage this other aspect of our service.

We are expanding our additional appointments in the evening with our GPs and Nurses to cater to those with less urgent problems and those who wish to see us outside of normal working hours, which hopefully should make it slightly easier to book a convenient appointment.

Thank you.

The GP Partners & Practice Team