Practice Services — Telephone Appointments

One of the ways that we are researching to deal with the ever escalating requests for doctors appointments, is the use of the telephone; a survey of patients undertaken in 2001, showed that the vast majority of people value this service.

The doctors and nurses can be contacted in 2 main ways:

Via telephone:
- Via the triage service: if you would like advice about a problem, before you make an appointment, or if you feel you have a urgent problem, the receptionist will take a few details and arrange for the duty doctor to ring you back as soon as possible or at a time specified by yourself i.e lunchtime or after “4.30 pm”.
- If, for example, you wish to discuss a test result, the receptionist will take your return number and arrange for the duty doctor to ring you back. If you would rather speak to a particular doctor, this can generally be arranged, however, unless that doctor happens to be ‘on duty’, that day, it may take one or two days for your call to be returned.
- When expecting the doctor to call you back, we request that you turn off your ansaphone and let the practice know if you are going out: if the call is answered by a machine, confidentiality prevents the doctor from leaving a message, unless we have signed permission to do so; In such circumstances the call will not be rung again.
Via mail either through the ‘post’ or via E-mail: the doctors will try to reply as soon as possible to these queries.