Appointments

How to book an appointment

Information on appointment system

Under the 2023 Contract, introduced to General Practice from 1 April 2023, with effect from the 15 May 2023, when a patient contacts the surgery for an appointment, our care navigators (reception team members) who are fully trained will ask you about your medical condition to triage and direct you to the appropriate medical professional or service which would be most suitable to help you with your medical conditions. This is called care navigation.

If you are offered an appointment, these are not necessarily on the same day or at Abbey Road Surgery. Care navigation (Signposting) offering other services such as Pharmacy First, Physiotherapist, Self-referral services, 111, Minor illness nurse based at another surgery who are part of our PCN (Primary care network), etc.

We will continue to offer a combination of both telephone and face to face appointments. You will be advised the best approach for your needs.

You can also contact us for non-urgent clinical and admin enquiries via Accurx, an online service available from our website under contact us online.

Cancellations

If you cannot keep an appointment, please let us know as soon as possible if you are unable to make your appointment by calling us on 01992 654004 press option 1 to leave a message with your name, date of birth, day and time of your appointment to be cancelled after the tone. Any appointment cancellation request less than 1 hour before the appointment will not be accepted as we may not have enough time to offer the cancelled appointment(s) to other patients in need.

Appointments – help us run to time – to save you waiting

It is inevitable that sometimes we do fail to keep to time for appointments and understandably this is a common source of irritation for our patients. There is however a lot you can do to help us and we hope you will read this information for everybody’s benefit.

In general the NHS expects GPs to deal with your problems within a 10 minute appointment. This is better than in the past – in the 1980s the average was 6 minutes. However GPs deal with a lot more time consuming preventative work than in the past. There is a lot more to pack into each consultation – the extra 4 minutes does not compensate!

The problem is not only a UK/NHS issue. Statistics show that in the Spanish Health Service GPs have 6 minutes per patient on average and in Germany 8 minutes so we’re actually doing quite well.

Sometimes delays can be rather unavoidable due to a patient being unexpectedly seriously ill or needing urgent hospital admission. Other times a problem presented is very complicated and time consuming and has to be sorted immediately. This can lead to subsequent appointments running late. Fortunately such complex and prolonged consultations are relatively rare.

However the much commoner cause of delays is that several patients each surgery simply underestimate how much time their various problems take.

Inevitably, numerous issues takes very much more than 10 minute leading to delays for the next patients.

The following things do cause us problems keeping to time:

  • Presenting a long list of problems is unlikely to be dealt with effectively in 10 minutes.
  • Asking for another person (or more) to be seen ‘while I’m here’ after their own consultation.
  • Asking for repeat prescriptions during the consultation.
  • Spend 10 minutes talking about a minor problem and then suddenly announce a much more serious problem at the end of the consultation which cannot safely be postponed to another time (the ‘while I am here question’ – almost as leaving the room).

    So please – help us to help you get the best out of your consultation
  • If you have several problems summarise them for the doctor briefly at the beginning.  The doctor can then help you prioritise the most urgent or significant issues. You may probably then need to make a further appointment on another day to deal with the less significant problems. Please understand why the doctor may advise this.
  • Use your appointment time effectively and help us keep to time for everybody’s benefit by telling us of only one significant problem per consultation. However we can usually deal with 2 simple problems effectively during your appointment. The more you throw at us – the less effective we will be.
  • Please do be prepared for the doctor to advise that you make a second appointment to discuss the unrelated and less significant issues. It’s safer for you – and helpful to those following.
  • Your appointment is for one person only – please don’t ask us to deal with a second person ‘while I am here’.
  • Please don’t use your consultation time to obtain repeat prescriptions.

If there is a particular letter or result you want to discuss please tell the receptionist in advance so we can see it is available. Unfortunately we can experience very significant delays in receiving letters from hospitals over which we have no control. (several weeks sometimes)

Booking British sign language interpreter for an appointment

Repeat prescription request

We do not take repeat prescription requests over the phone. Repeat prescription request are actioned within 48 working hours starting from following day after the request has been received. We can only issue medications which are on your repeat medication list and are due within the next 7 days.

The easiest ways to order repeat prescriptions are:

Only times we would not issue any requested medication after receiving the request as follows:  

*If the repeat medication is not due within the next 7 days  

*If the repeat medication was not requested such as not ticked among other repeat medications  

*If the medication is not on your repeat medication list  

It is patient’s responsibility to request their repeat medication when they are due within the next 7 days, either themselves or via their nominated pharmacy.