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Care Opinion

GP appointment booking service

Posted By Hollycat

"GP appointment booking service"

About: West Oak Surgery

(as a service user),

I've been getting increasingly frustrated when trying to book a non urgent GP appointment. We now have to book online (when I've tried this, all advance appointments were booked up) or call on the day on the off chance of getting an appointment, which is not convenient for those of us who work.

Moreover, when physically in the surgery this morning, I was advised that I could not book an advance appointment with the receptionist and her colleague piped up: "Everybody's online now! "

I'm sure many elderly people are not and as I stated before, the advance appointments were booked up when I went online before.

I'm exasperated and this detracts from what is an excellent practice, once you get through the door, that is.

An audience with the pope is probably simpler to arrange!

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Responses

Response from West Oak Surgery 5 years ago
West Oak Surgery

Submitted on 18/05/2018 at 18:24
Published on nhs.uk at 19:07

Over the last few months, there has been a considerable increase in the demand for appointments. The surgery uses reception triage which is a system used to assess urgency of cases and to place patients on the appropriate care pathways ensuring the patient is directed to the most appropriate resource.

When you telephone to book an appointment to see the GP, the receptionist may ask you a few simple and non-intrusive questions.

“To help make you the correct appointment are you able to tell me a brief outline of the problem”

This is because reception has a number of alterative types of appointments available to offer you. These will include:

Same day appointments

Urgent appointments

An appointment with the Nurse or Healthcare Assistant

A telephone consultation with the GP

A telephone consultation with the Nurse

Leaving a message for the relevant person to deal with your problem or query

Signposting you to another appropriate service such as Pharmacy First. (please ask reception or collect a leaflet from the surgery for further info)

For the online services the appointments available are for same day routine appointment which are released mainly at 8am and a small percentage released at 7am aimed at the working age group.

Deborah Rattray - Practice Manager

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