"surgery has become worse"

Dear Patient. The phone system you have mentioned is added to the service as patients said that did not like to ring and get an engaged tone. The new system is auditable so if you would like to contact me directly at the surgery we can ask the local team to look at your individual records and wait times so we can use this to improve our service where possible. The new phone system will allow 4 people in a queue at a time and we have normally 4 staff answering phones at a time. We are answering on average daily around 170 - 200 phone calls a day as well as running the full reception. Average call answered is over 87.7%, calls are abandoned or put down often within less than 1 minute of waiting running of the figures we have available at present.

Minor surgery is offered at the practice and is a very busy service. All Drs have bookable appointments available on line if this would help you to access them in advance. Every patient is given an opportunity to use this service as there is no priority on accessibility.

We are very sorry that you feel these ideas are rubbish but they have come from patient feedback and to deal with the volume of calls we are needing to handle.

If you would like to discuss this further or give us your number and we can look into this for you we would be most happy to help you.

Janet Keyser