"Patients are blocked from booking appointments"

Dear Patient,

Many thanks for your time providing this feedback and we are sorry we have not met your expectations with difficulty getting an appointment for your prescription.

Please be reassured we only see NHS patients and do not run a private service – we apologise if there has been a miscommunication to you with this.

Regarding difficulty getting an appointment, we are working very hard every day to meet patient demand, but we, like all GP surgeries, do not have capacity to see every patient when they feel they need to be seen.

Last month (March) we held over 16,200 consultations with over 5,300 appointments offered via our daily triage. In this were over 1,000 routine appointments which is in addition to all clinical admin work (e.g., prescriptions, test results, requests from Hospitals, etc).

Many of the other 10,900 appointments are booked via NHSApp (e.g., smears and blood tests), self-booking links (e.g., health reviews) or when follow up is needed.

With our same day triage, although you may need to contact us on multiple days for a ‘non-urgent’ appointment, this is typically sooner and safer than asking patients to wait up to six weeks.

To support our patients and staff, we review available capacity each day to ensure we have same day access to our patients who need us most after our appointment book is ‘full’.

As part of improvements on how to contact us, we introduced ‘anima’ in February but while this should improve how to contact us, anima is not increasing our capacity and when our appointment book is full you will not be able to get medical help online.

In the last four weeks, we received over 360 medical requests from patients online via anima and you can generally submit medical requests from 8am Monday to Friday.

We cannot confirm how we responded to your medication requests as this is anonymous feedback and each unique request requires a response appropriate to its clinical context.

Depending on the context to your prescription, we may have added you to our pharmacist or GP appointment book, approved your request at source, instructed you to request a ‘routine’ appointment, or various other potential outcomes. If you’d like us to investigate this formally, you can request this by:

1. Completing a complaints form at reception

2. Completing a feedback form online: Feedback & Complaints - Meon Health Practice

3. By letter to Complaints c/o 102 Highlands, Fareham, PO15 6JF

4. By telephone

We apologise again we have not met your expectations in the experience you describe and we thank you again for sharing your feedback.

We believe all feedback helps us to deliver an improved service in future.

Yours sincerely,

James Leach

Patient Service Manager