Patient Information

Posted on October 16th, 2020

We are very sorry that a number of patients were experiencing difficulties accessing the surgery via telephone last week. This has been thoroughly investigated by our provider and was due to some networks disconnecting your calls as your provider had not registered a connection to our service within their specified time. We have now rectified this issue and will ensure that it is not replicated in future.

We are also very aware that our telephone lines are extremely busy at present. There are a number of reasons for this. Like many other businesses we are experiencing intermittent staffing issues, some of which are due to Covid-19 testing.
We have invested heavily in alternative contact methods such as online appointment and prescription bookings. This helped to reduce the inbound telephone traffic however we have now had to remove some of this access to ensure that everyone is kept as safe as possible through the pandemic.

Our staff  are working tirelessly to get through an ever increasing number of calls and we do understand your frustrations. It would help everyone if callers could please be patient with our staff. Many patients are spending several minutes complaining about the number of people waiting and the time it has taken to get through, this is making our receptionists job increasingly stressful and not helping the patients behind you in the queue. Please try and be concise with your request and understand that what we offer now may differ from what we offered previously.

Our reception staff are trying their very best in what is a very challenging climate. If you are able to, please consider using one of the available apps to order prescriptions electronically in particular the NHS App proves extremely popular with our patients who use it currently. Visit https://www.nhs.uk/using-the-nhs/nhs-services/the-nhs-app/ for further details.