"Wye surgery not able to provide basic care"

Dear Sir / Madam,

I was very sorry to read your 1 star review of Wye Surgery.

Your grievance is in relation to being signposted to A&E and the Urgent Treatment Centre.

The surgery does, on occasion, receive calls from patients who require emergency medical attention. General Practice is not an emergency service, but it is often a gateway to other NHS Services, as you rightly point out in your review. Patients that require emergency medical attention, e.g. if they are having a stroke or heart attack, will be advised by our team to attend A&E or call an ambulance. This is the safest possible course of action for emergency issues.

General Practice is currently under an extreme amount of pressure. The demand for GP services is rising while the number of GP’s in the country is declining. The NHS has developed a Long Term Plan which, in part, addresses the need to ease the pressure on both A&E and primary care services. UTC’s are GP led services that have been implemented across the country to address the issue of overflow of urgent issues that do not require a hospital visit but exceed the capacity of GP surgeries.

As a surgery we have recently changed our appointment system, to meet the needs of our patients, to improve access and to increase capacity. We now offer our patients the ability to book appointments up to two weeks in advance. This can be done in person, over the telephone or online. We offer our patients the choice of GP, as well as the choice of a telephone consultation or face to face appointment. The new system has been well received by the vast majority of our patients. We also offer same day appointments for urgent acute issues that cannot wait until the next available appointment. Unfortunately, we do not have unlimited capacity and there will be times where demand exceeds the number of appointments that we can safely offer. In these instances we advise patients to contact an Urgent Treatment Centre.

There are ways in which our patients can help improve our appointment availability. In recent weeks we have come across patients who have demanded same day appointments for issues that would have been able to wait for a routine appointment, patients that have booked urgent appointments via NHS111 only to tell the GP, when contacted, that the issue has now resolved and patients that have refused to attend the UTC. Each of these examples means that we may not have been able to offer same day appointments to patients with genuine urgent issues. In the last working week the surgery has had 24 DNA’s. These are appointments that patients booked but did not attend. We ask that our patients cancel unwanted appointments so they can be rebooked for patients with a genuine need.

I hope that my response has explained the use of A&E and UTC’s.

Kind regards,

Tara

Practice Manager.