"Not acceptable."

Thank you for taking the time to give your feedback. We welcome feedback, good or bad, as it allows us to reflect on our service and make necessary improvements, where possible.

I am sorry to hear of your negative experiences. Rest assured your comments are taken seriously.

I appreciate the phone lines are extremely busy and it is frustrating to be held in a call queue. At present we are receiving upwards of 600 calls a day in to the surgery. We try to answer calls as quickly as possible but, as you can appreciate, some patients require longer as they have complex needs. The current level of calls is equal to what we would normally expect in the winter months. We ask patients to call for results and routine matters in the afternoon and to make use of our online services and e-consults where possible.

In response to the Covid -19 pandemic NHS England advised all GP surgeries to adopt a total triage model. Total triage means that all patients contacting the surgery first provide some information about the nature of their call and are then triaged by a health care professional before an appointment is given. This is to protect patients and staff from avoidable risk of infection.

We are making use of telephone calls, video consultations, photo messaging and where necessary face to face appointments. I can assure you that face to face appointments have been given all through the pandemic.

Adopting our practice to include this new way of working ,as described above, has increased our capacity for patient contact and if all of these appointments were converted to face to face then we would have much less capacity.

Appointments for bloods has been an issue as you rightly say. The current waiting time for routine bloods is around 4 weeks. The local hospitals have stopped their walk in service for bloods which has had an impact on us. Also, we have had to add cleaning time on to each appointment to allow for staff to change PPE and clean, according to Covid guidelines, between each patient. This has cut our appointments in half. We have appointed new staff who will be able to help with these appointments in due course.

It has been a challenging 18 months and I hope you will read this reply in the manner for which it was intended. Not as excuses but maybe as some explanation for the difficulties you have encountered.

If you would like to discuss any of these matter further then please contact Sharon Crosby (practice manager) or Sue Greenwood (patient services manager).