"Went downhill completely "

I am sorry to learn your feelings about the service we work so hard to provide. It is not helpful to us to write general and anonymous critiques: to correct problems we need to investigate the specific issues and not knowing who you are does not allow us to look any further. Perhaps you might contact us and work through any examples so show us where we’ve been going wrong so we can improve?

You are correct that many things can rightly be blamed on Covid19. It is so easy to write a complaint but more difficult to provide an extremely complex service through a world emergency, an unknown disease with evolving knowledge and changing advice, demand growing higher than previously experienced with staff sickness and other constrained resources. We have had to completely change the way we work and of course there is no normal to return to, at least at present.

You mention many new doctors – that’s because we are trying to meet the demand. We have had two maternity leaves to cover and sadly, due to fewer wanting to commit to general practice now (stress, workload, constant criticism etc), we find it hard to recruit permanent doctors, so many of these will be temporary and they cannot provide the level of service you were used to in the past. We are also a training practice to develop future GPs, so do have several young doctors rotating through our practice for parts of their programme.

We are sorry the practice website was out of action for just over 24hrs due to an oversight by our webhost service to renew our domain registration. Once we were alerted, it was quickly fixed and was up and running before your post appeared. eConsult is also available, however, through the NHS App, so we recommend downloading this for many NHS services. Also, of course our surgery phone is always available in hours. 111 provides the normal out of hours service.

We shall continue to try our very best under the, hopefully, improving circumstances and hope you get back to recommending our surgery for friends and family in the future!