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Continuous Issues with making an Appointment

Story from nhs.uk

"Continuous Issues with making an Appointment "

About: The Gainsborough Practice

I have been with this practice for years, and I am appalled that to this day their appointment system is still flawed. You can't seem to make any appointments unless you call at 8 in the morning. And even then, you have to repeatedly phone as all the lines are busy. Even when you get through, usually at about 15 minutes since the lines have opened, you are often informed that there are no appointments left for that day, which seems impressive that all appointments are filled within 15 minutes of the lines being open. They do offer to make an appointment with the nurse for you, but this leads to the wonderful nurses (truly fantastic nurses) being extremely overworked and under immense time constraints to see/call patients. I wish I could say that this is only sometimes, but it isn't. It is 90% of the time, if not more. And I know it is a not just an issue that I've been having, as other patients with this practice have told me identical stories. I dont know if it's because there are too many patients registered at the doctors and demand is simply too high, or if there's some sort of scheduling that results in this. Either way, it has been happening for far too long, so can you please do something to improve the service. And if you have, then I'm afraid to say it hasn't worked.

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Responses

Response from The Gainsborough Practice 4 years ago
The Gainsborough Practice

Submitted on 25/10/2019 at 10:14
Published on nhs.uk at 16:51

Dear Patient,

Thank you for your comment and we are sorry you have experienced problems whilst trying to book an appointment. Due to the anonymity of this comment, it has made it difficult to fully respond as the circumstances are unknown, so after reading this reply, if you wish to discuss it further, please contact our practice to do so. We are disappointed to hear you are unhappy with the appointment system; we do continuously review our appointment book to try to meet patient demand. We offer a variety of appointments on a daily basis ranging from on the day routine appointments, on the day emergencies for problems needing urgent treatment that day and a few pre-bookable appointments. We also have an emergency doctor available from 8am to 6:30pm to deal with urgent conditions. The doctors also have pre bookable telephone appointments every morning and afternoon. Our nurses are trained to triage minor ailments and have designated time allocated every morning and every afternoon to telephone and see patients. We also have developed a multi -disciplinary team that includes a MSK Practitioner to see our patients who have sprains, strains and joint problems and a Clinical Pharmacist seeing patients for medication reviews, hypertension and asthma reviews. In addition to these, Nurse, Health Care Assistant and Phlebotomy appointments are available on Monday evenings for our patients at Brants Bridge and Doctor, Nurse, Health Care Assistant and Phlebotomy appointments available in Extended Hours at Boundary House surgery every evening and on Saturdays and Sundays, all of which can be booked for you by a member of our Reception team. You also have the option of consulting with a clinician using eConsult. We will soon be having a Social Prescriber working at the practice and from November a regular locum GP to provide extra appointments to help with the winter pressures. All of the mentioned above has been put into place in order to ensure everyone is seen by the most appropriate clinician, which does sometimes mean it will not necessarily be a GP. We thank you for your feedback and we hope this clarifies the work we are doing to further improve patient access and, as previously mentioned, please feel free to contact us if you would like to discuss this further.

Kind regards

Diana Lock – Practice Manager

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