Appointment System

Some initial appointments will be carried out via telephone or via video call. If it is clinically needed for you to seen face to face this will be booked by the clinician when they call you. We have pre-bookable telephone appointments with the doctor of your choice along with a selection of on the day telephone appointments with doctors and nurse practitioner for more acute problems.

If you want to see a particular doctor you can book a routine telephone appointment with them up to 2 weeks in advance.
If you feel that your issue needs to be dealt with urgently, you can request to speak to a clinician on that same day.
If your issue needs to be dealt with on the same day, the receptionist may ask for a brief outline of your condition.

Reception staff are trained to ask certain questions in order to ensure that you receive:

The most appropriate medical care
From the most appropriate health professional
At the most appropriate time

Reception staff, like all members of the team, are bound by confidentiality rules

You can ask to speak to a receptionist in private away from the reception counter
However if you feel an issue is very private and do not wish to say what this is then we will respect your decision.

If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to speak to the reception team. Thank you.

We offer a chaperone service to all our patients, please ask if you would like to take advantage of this

Please ask the receptionist if you require a sign language (what language) or spoken language interpreter

PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU MAY BE ASKED TO RECONFIRM THE APPOINTMENT TIME WE HAVE GIVEN YOU TO ENSURE YOU HAVE HEARD THE TIME CORRECTLY, AS WE HAVE HAD INSTANCES OF PATIENTS TURINGIN UP LATE AFTER MISHEARING THEIR APPOINTMENT TIME - THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPREATION WITH THIS

Online Appointments

We are starting to re-introduce booking appointments online if you have online patient access. Currently you can book Cervical Screening, Diabetic and Asthma Reviews for patients who have received an invite to book an appointment.

Please make sure that you are booking into the correct clinic, you wouldn't believe the number of men that book in for cervical screening! This then causes our administration team more work - if you book into the wrong clinic, simply because you need an appointment, this will be cancelled, and we may not inform you until you arrive for the appointment - so please only book into correct clinics

Appointment Times

Please be aware that the doctors and nurse practitioners work to appointment times of about 10 minutes. Within this time they will aim to address what issues they can.

This usually means they can only address 1 issue, and may ask you to book another appointment at a later date.

1 patient, 1 appointment, 1 issue

Waiting Times

“Why do I sometimes need to wait to see the doctor, nurse practitioner, practice nurse or healthcare assistant?”

"Why, when I turn up for my appointment on time, am I kept waiting?"

All the members of the team at this Practice work extremely hard to ensure that you are not kept waiting unnecessarily.

However, sometimes the team deal with very complicated situations or emergencies. We will aim to inform you on these occasions, and request that you understand that you will be called/seen as soon as possible, some issues could have arose earlier in the day which have a knock on effect for the rest of the day, or could have just happened, some examples are:

patient could deteriorate whilst in surgery, we might have had to call an ambulance and depending on the condition the clinician might have to stay with them till the paramedics arrive
patients symptoms could mean they have to be referred to secondary care at hospital and this sometimes entails awaiting telephone calls back from the speciality at the hospital
patients sometimes become aggressive and/or violent
patients try to talk about other issues other than the one they came in for

If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to speak to Layla our Reception team Leader or any of the reception team. Thank you.

Cancellations

If you are no longer available for an appointment for any reason, please inform us as soon as possible, in order for us to give the appointment to someone else. Please be aware, if you cancel an appointment within 1 hour of the allotted time, then this will still be classed as a 'did not attend appointment' as we would find it hard to fill the appointment in a short space of time. If there is continued missed appointments, then we may take steps to remove you from our list of registered patients, due to a breakdown in relationship and you will be asked to register elsewhere, we would always give notice of this in advance, unless the reason is for violent behaviour.

If you have booked an appointment in advance and then decide you no longer need this as you have sought more urgent help sooner or things have resolved, then please advise us either by phone or by email (lscicb-gp.p81015.reception@nhs.net) within an appropriate time frame. If you do not attend for a booked appointment this can be followed up with a text from ourselves to ensure you are ok and to remind you that appointments are valuable, and can be noted on your records.

Every month hundreds of appointments are wasted because people book them, but then fail to attend without cancelling. This means these appointments are not available for anyone else to use. All patients then may have to wait longer to see the doctor, nurse practitioner, nurse, or healthcare assistant.

Updated April 2023

Housebound Patients

Housebound patients

We have developed a definition of housebound in collaboration with GPs and community teams to encourage people, who are able, to attend clinics for their appointments and to limit the use of home visits.

Our agreed definition of housebound guidelines aims to ensure that community nurses and GP clinical teams are providing routine clinical appointments in the home setting only when it is appropriate. It is acknowledged that an individual’s needs may change and therefore eligibility for a home visit should be reassessed on a regular basis.

Definition of Housebound

“Patients are eligible for home visits for routine treatment only when a patient is unable to leave their home due to physical or psychological illness as this type of appointment takes much more time than if the patient is able to make it into their local clinic or GP surgery.

A patient will be deemed to be housebound when they are unable to leave their home environment through physical and/or psychological illness.

An individual will not be eligible for a home visit if they are able to leave their home environment on their own or with minimal assistance to visit public or social recreational public services (including shopping).

Wherever possible patients are encouraged to attend local community venues for their care.

Principles

Ultimate responsibility to determine whether a patient requires a home visit rests with the assessing clinician.
Each patient’s eligibility for home visits will be individually determined.
Patients assessed as not meeting the criteria for housebound will be expected to attend a clinic or surgery setting.
The assessment for housebound will ensure a holistic approach including assessment of the patients’ physical, social and psychological needs.
Individual circumstances will be monitored and where an individual and/or Health care Professional assesses that the patient’s needs have changed due to either an acute onset of illness or gradual deterioration in their conditions, the patient’s housebound status will be reviewed.”

The implementation of the definition of housebound will bring the following benefits:

Patients who are not able to travel to a clinic or surgery and need to have their care delivered at home are seen in a more timely and efficient way
More clinical care is delivered in the best setting for delivering safe care
Time of clinical teams is most efficiently and cost-effectively utilised

Each patient’s eligibility for home visits will be individually determined by the clinician, based on the above definition and patients assessed as not meeting the criteria for housebound will be expected to attend a clinic or surgery setting. Individual circumstances will be monitored and where an individual and/or health care professional assesses that the patient’s needs have changed, the patient’s housebound status will be reviewed.

Sickness Certificates

You do not require a doctor's sickness certificate for any illness lasting seven days or less. Your employer may however require you to complete a self-certification form (SC2) which is available from your employer or on the HMRC website.

Evidence that you are sick

If you are sick for more than seven days, your employer can ask you to give them some form of medical evidence to support payment of SSP (statutory sick pay).

It is up to your employer to decide whether you are incapable of work. A medical certificate, now called a 'Statement of Fitness for Work’ (see below) from your doctor is strong evidence that you are sick and would normally be accepted, unless there is evidence to prove otherwise.

You could also provide evidence from someone who is not a medical practitioner, e.g. a dentist. Your employer will decide whether or not this evidence is acceptable. If your employer has any doubts, they may still ask for a medical certificate from your GP.

Statement of Fitness for Work - ’Fit Note'

The 'fit note' was introduced on 6 April 2010. With your employer's support, the note will help you return to work sooner by providing more information about the effects of your illness or injury. Please be aware that if sick notes are issued for longer than 6 months without you being seen by one of our clinicians, you will be asked to present for a face-to-face appointment to discuss your ongoing illness before any further sick notes will be issued.

For more information see the DirectGov website (where this information was sourced).

Transmitting eMED3 fit note data to the DWP

The DWP performs a weekly anonymous extract of fit note usage data for collection, storage, transmission and publication by NHS England

If a patient does not consent to secondary use of GP patient identifiable data, it must be coded on the patient's care record. If patients don't actively express dissent, implied consent is assumed.

To comply with the Department of Health's patient objection policy, data about patients who have dissented from secondary use of their data will not be included in the extract. If you wish to dissent from this please complete this form Opt Out Form and return to the surgery.

What data is included in the extract?

The data extracted is completely anonymous to protect patient privacy and consists of:

How many eMED3 fit notes are issued.
How many patients are recorded as 'unfit' or 'maybe fit' for work.
Fit note duration.
Gender.
Health condition type aggregated to a high level diagnosis code, for example, paranoid schizophrenia would be classed as a Mental Disorder.
Location, including ICB areas.
Whether workplace adaptations were recommended.
The Issuer's profession.

Photographs

With the increased use of online and remote consultations, there may be some occasions where we ask you to send us an image of your area of concern. To protect both our patients and our team, we adhere to strict guidelines about the request, receipt, storage and deletion of any images we ask you to send us.

By law, we cannot receive any images of sensitive areas of any patients under the age of 18. For patients over the age of 18, the law is different and images can be sent but only with the full consent of the patient, or their representative if the patient lacks capacity. However, we would normally agree a different method of consultation if this was your area of concern, however if there are special circumstances, this can be agreed with our Reception Team Leader or Care Coordinators.

You are not permitted to send any images to us without the express request of the clinician and this request will be documented in the medical record, including the type and location of the authorised image. Any images sent without express permission or that exceed the permission given will be deleted and may be subject to further action.

If we ask for images, we will send a secure link to either your mobile number or email address as you prefer.

if you have any further queries regarding this then please liaise with our Reception Team Leader; Layla or our Operations Manager; Tracy, who will be only too glad to help.

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