Home Visiting guidance

Lisson Grove and Woolwell Medical Centres

Tel: 01752 205555 Fax: 01752 205558 Website: www.lissongroveandwoolwellmc.co.uk

Home Visiting Guidance for Patients, Carers and Care Staff.

Introduction

Every day we work hard to ensure that our clinicians can meet the requests made to them by patients, carers, community and other health and social care staff.

In order to ensure that we can do this consistently and deliver a high quality service we need your help to use our limited clinical capacity as effectively as possible.

This guide has been put together to help us help you.

If you feel we can do better or would like to feedback about this guide please let us know.

You can do this in writing, via the contact form on our website or simply by telling a member of staff.

Home Visits

Home visits take up a lot of time. Each visit will take anywhere between 20 minutes and 45 minutes of a GPs time. On some days we have as many as 8 visit requests.

This means that we have to triage visits to ensure that the attendance of a clinician will make a significant difference to the outcome and that we do so in a timely manner so that our patients do not deteriorate as a result.

Putting in Your Request – Helping us to Help You:

Please let is know as soon as possible that you think you or someone you care for needs a home visit.

Doing so before 10:00am allows us to plan our daily workload and meet the needs of our patients as best we can.

Please be clear with reception staff what you think the problem is and how urgent it is from your perspective.

If you think the problem is imminently life threatening please dial 999.

If you are not the patient please leave your contact details as you will be phoned back so that we can triage your request.

If you are not sure whether a visit is the best way forward, please tell reception staff and we will get a clinician to ring you back so that we can come to a mutually agreeable solution.

We will work with you to ensure that a visit takes place when the presence of a clinician is considered the only means to address the needs of the individual safely and effectively.