Appointment Guide

We have produced this appointment guide to provide information to patients on how our appointment system works to assist patients in booking an appointment. The rules for booking appointments have been put in place by the doctors, and the staff are following the doctor’s instructions.

Patients can phone or attend the surgery (to make an appointment) any time between 8.00am and 6.30pm. On-line appointments can be accessed at any time. Please note appointments are booked for 10 minutes. If you feel that your case is going to be more complicated than this, please book a longer appointment. Please do not bring a list of unrelated problems to be dealt with in one appointment. This leads either to insufficient time for the doctor to deal adequately with each problem or considerable delay to other waiting patients. Patients are advised to phone early to request an appointment for the same day.

We have many appointments that are bookable up to three weeks in advance with all doctors that are not on leave.

We have a limited number of "on the day" spaces which are only available for our staff to book on the day.

We operate an emergency clinic each morning and afternoon. Patients may be seen be either the Urgent Care Practitioner or a duty GP. The duty GP also covers any emergency visits, so may need to leave the surgery to attend to any visits. This will obviously lead to a delay for those patients booked into the emergency clinic. If you book into the emergency clinic and your problem is not deemed to be an emergency, you will be asked to book a routine appointment at another time. We do ask our receptionists to ask for some basic details of the reason for booking an emergency appointments, to allow us to prioritise the appointment. A patient with chest pain or breathlessness will need to be seen more urgently; therefore patients might not be seen in order of arrival, but in order of medical priority.

Patients can book a telephone consultation in the same way as a face-to-face consultation and a doctor will telephone the patient either at a specific time or after surgery.

Whenever possible, patients are advised to book appointments in advance or on-line as this will give the greatest choice of doctor, day and time.

We do try to deal with patient’s requests for appointments as efficiently as possible and we do ask for your help in doing this. Please bear with us if we are running late.