"review of latham house medical practice"

Thanks for your feedback. We’re sorry to hear about your recent frustrations. We share your frustration about patients being moved around between doctors and we don’t want to be doing that any more than we have to. Unfortunately both locally and nationally there is a shortage of GPs. We’re working hard to recruit more GPs and other healthcare professionals and hope to get back to a more stable position soon but these are challenging times. Overall though our doctor list system works well and provides much better continuity of care than most practices can provide. Many practices are very heavily reliant on ad hoc locum GPs and it can be near impossible to get to know a GP who you see consistently. That said, you shouldn’t have been moved doctors three times. We’ll look into why that happened and see what we can do to prevent this from happening in the future.

We’re really sorry to hear that it has taken you 45 minutes to get through to us on the phone. That’s far too long. 10 minutes is too long. There are a number of things we’re doing to try and improve matters – we will soon be answering phones from 8am each morning which will give an extra 30 minutes of answering the phones each day. We’re recruiting apprentices to get more help on the phones. We’re also encouraging more people to use our online services so less people need to phone in.

The car park situation is harder to improve! It’s a challenge for lots of GP practices and hospitals. Where possible, we’d encourage patients to use public transport so that our car park can be used by those who need it most.

Do please get in touch with us directly if there’s anything more we can do to help and we hope you start to see improvements soon.

Matt Doig

Interim Practice Manager