"Don’t join!"

Thank you for taking time to comment. These are clearly disappointing, but I believe I can refute at lease some of them.

I can assure you that we do not have 'too many patients'.

We constantly monitor the patient / GP ratio and discuss this with both our Patient Group and the GP partners. If more clinical staff are required we provide these.

We recently checked this and I can confirm that we have more GPs than is currently recommended and we provide more appointments than we are advised to.

Our appointments are also monitored as part of our contract with the Clinical Commissioning Group who do a capacity versus demand audit.

We receive thousands of prescription requests each month and the vast majority are correct and on time.

We are contractually obliged to provide a prescription within 24 hours of receipt but we do ask patients to wait 48 hours before collecting just in case their is an issue that needs resolving.

If a prescription request took longer than this we would certainly make it the highest priority especially if it was being chased by a patient. I therefore cannot see that a prescription would take 7 days to issue and would welcome your contact to investigate this fully.

You state that the old practice would prioritise and accommodate 'especially for babies'.

We have a duty GP each day and pride ourselves that if a young patient needs to be seen we will ensure an appointment is made with the duty GP.

During my thorough investigation into your post I have discussed this with the midwives and they have stated that we "are one of the best in the district" at providing appointments for young patients. Again I would like to hear from you to investigate when your baby could not get an appointment.

You also state that you were told to go to the A&E when we had no appointments and this is possibly the allegation that concerns me the most. We were part of a pilot scheme for Care Navigation and our staff have been trained on signposting patients to the most appropriate health and social care which is then documented via a template entry. I therefore believe that our staff would never send a patient to A&E for a routine appointment and wonder if the confusion arose when we may have suggested that if the clinical condition gets worse during the night you contact NHS 111 or in an emergency attend A&E. Again if you could contact me we can discuss this too.

Finally you state that the GP would say to call reception 'if you need some more'.

Unfortunately I do not have sufficient information to investigate this but I am guessing that you may have meant a prescription and therefore more medication.

We have a dedicated prescription clerk who deals with these requests, but even she is unable to prescribe additional items without a GP's authority and a GP appointment may have been necessary.

I would urge you to contact me to discuss the above allegations so I can conduct a full investigation into your concerns. Thank you.