We are changing how we manage our appointments system in order to try to cut waiting times for certain types of appointment.  You can read full information about this decision and the reasons behind it here. 

When you contact us for an appointment, or a clinician feels they need to see or speak to you following a test result or hospital appointment, one of two things will happen:

1. If an appointment is available in the next two weeks, we’ll contact you to book it there and then.  We will not book further ahead at this point (*see below for exceptions). 

2. If not, we will send you a text (or email or letter) to advise that we know you need a face-to-face or telephone appointment and that we will be in touch soon. We hope this will assure patients that they are not forgotten and that, when we are in touch, we can offer an appointment within a two-three week period as these become available.  Additionally, we hope this will result in reduced duplication and appointments going to waste, reducing the number of patients who do not attend (‘DNA’) appointments.  Rest assured that, if the appointments available do not work for the patient, they will remain at the top of the list for booking according to their availability. (It really helps us when patients use the option in Klinik to advise times they would not be available for an appointment).

*Our urgent on-the-day clinician appointments and our routine nursing appointment processes remain unchanged, as do some of our planned procedure clinics, such as minor surgery or contraceptive services, which will be booked up to six weeks in advance.

By reducing duplicated and DNA appointments, we can bring waiting times down for all our patients – this is our primary aim. 

We continue to lobby locally and nationally for better funding for practices such as ours, which national evidence confirms have higher workloads than the average practice.  Increased funding would provide more clinicians to offer additional capacity to see and treat patients. 

We hope this update is helpful.  Please do go to the link above for a fuller explanation should you have any queries.

 With helpful input from our Patient Participation Group, we hope the below information helps patients with our online Klinik system.

Now we’ve shared what we hope have been some helpful tips for you, can you help us by avoiding the following pitfalls?

PLEASE DON’T … 

Staffing

We are continuing to strive to recruit more GPs and advanced practitioners to provide care for our patients.  Clearly we would wish these clinicians to work in the practice to provide increased face-to-face appointments and quicker access to follow-up care.  We will continue to endeavour to recruit for this purpose.  We are, however, able to recruit some GPs and practitioners from outside our area to work remotely.  We are pleased to say there will be some new names joining the team in the coming weeks, handling patient needs which can be managed over the telephone (such as non urgent issues and ongoing chronic disease reviews) meaning our existing local clinicians are able to focus on providing face-to-face appointments.

Activity

We are continuing to experience high levels of demand for services and we know many patients are reporting concerns about getting through to our teams and accessing services they need.  We want to assure our patients are teams are working exceptionally hard and we are sorry we cannot offer appointments as quickly as our patients may wish. 

 To reassure our patients that the team are working exceptionally hard, in the month of October 2022 we have:

•  Received and responded to 7276 issues raised through our Klinik system alone, the top three reasons being:
• 3500 from patients with a new health problem
• 1750 from patients requiring follow-up care around an existing health problem
• 650 patients needing nurse appointments

• Consulted with over 7200 patients
• Issued via prescription over 62,700 different medications to patients

Access for non-urgent issues

Our teams are working overtime and staying late wherever possible but we are anxious to protect them from overwork and potentially becoming unwell.  We ask our patients to contact us between 0800-1300 or 1400-1700 for their usual care and requests for on-the-day consultations for acute illnesses.  Both our telephone lines and our online consultation service (Klinik) will be open for this purpose during these times.

Between 1300-1400 and after 1700 only issues of an urgent nature can be handled.  Our online system will be closed during these times and our telephone message will advise patients with a non-urgent issue to call back. 

Over 75% of patients use Klinik to for their new health problem, sick note requests or to cancel an appointment already and options include:

• Follow up/concern about existing health problems
• Long-term (chronic disease) condition review request
• Referral queries
• Nurse enquiries
• Test results
• Medication queries
• Submit your health readings & measurements option
• General enquiries/update your details
• Insurance and other reports/private letters queries
• Self-care options

All patients with access to the internet or a smartphone/device are being asked to use this system, leaving our phone lines for those who cannot.   Please do click here to read our original briefing from last November which explains more about why we implemented Klinik and its benefits to our patients.

Sending photos

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are now doing much more of our work through telephone consultations. Sometimes it is useful for the nurse or doctor to see a picture, or you may feel it will help them understand your problem. This is particularly the case with skin lesions or rashes. To help us and you we will no longer be accepting photos through our email address. All photos will have to be sent through a text message reply. Any photos sent via email will be returned unopened and you will be directed to send them via our text service.

Sometimes you may have a skin problem in an intimate area such as on breasts, genitalia (vagina & penis), or the anus (back passage). In this case please arrange a telephone consultation first. The nurse or doctor will then decide if they need a visual image and arrange this either through a face to face appointment, photos via video consultation. Please DO NOT send intimate photos without talking to a nurse or doctor first.

If your child has a rash in an intimate area we will usually arrange for a face to face consultation if we need to see the rash. DO NOT take photos of your child’s genitalia or anus and send them to us, this will leave you open to prosecution for making indecent images of a child. 

How to take a high-quality clinical image

1. ​​Ideally, ask someone else to take the photo.
2. Use a plain background.
3. Ensure good overhead lighting.
4. Take a wider image to establish location and then a close up of the lesion or rash. Different angles can help demonstrate size/shape of a lesion.
5. Ensure the images are in focus.

According to the latest evidence we can treat most urine infections based on symptoms alone. We therefore now only accept urine samples when a clinician (doctor, nurse, paramedic) has explicitly asked you to bring one in or when we have written to you to ask for a repeat sample. 

If you feel you have a urine or water infection please complete an online consultation here or call if you do not have internet access. If you call, our telephone hub team will ask you some simple questions and may be able to direct you to your pharmacist for quick treatment if required. Your pharmacist can prescribe antibiotics for a simple urine infection. These can be supplied free of charge if you do not normally pay for your prescriptions. 

Please take a look at the below videos that explain more -

Extended Healthcare

Clinical Pharmacist

Social Prescriber