How to book Appointments:

To book an appointment visit our consulting room.

If you would like to register for online services, please call us and we will send you details of how to register.

If you need to be seen urgently, please call as early as you can. Although there are a limited amount of non-urgent appointments released every day for 48 hours ahead at 08:00 each morning, these do get booked soon after our telephone lines open. If you miss one of these but feel that your medical problem cannot wait until next available appointment, you can request a call back from the on call doctor. Please see the non-urgent appointment section below.

Our receptionists are specially trained to fit you in with the most appropriate consulter, be it a doctor, nurse or healthcare assistant. Please help us by being prepared to answer a few general and non-intrusive questions regarding why you need to be seen. If you prefer not to give any information, just let the receptionist know and they will respect your wishes.

Non-Urgent Appointments

Due to the huge increased demand we have seen in recent years with no funding for extra GPs, I’m afraid that patients can wait around 10 working days or more for a non-urgent appointment. If a patient feels that their non-urgent problem cannot wait until the next available appointment, they can ask to speak to the on-call doctor who will call them back. If the on-call doctor agrees that the problem cannot wait, they may be able to find an earlier appointment.

Urgent Appointments

If a patient needs an urgent same day appointment and the on-call doctor agrees after speaking to them, we guarantee that the patient will be seen the same day. This service is triaged by a GP who will use their clinical knowledge and experience to decide if a problem can wait or be dealt with on the phone. This ensures that patients get an appointment to suit their medical need.

Length of Appointments

A single appointment lasts 10 minutes, which is usually enough to deal with one problem. If you have more than one problem to cover or feel that you will need more time, please ask for a longer appointment.

Patients being late for appointments:

We see hundreds of patients each day and only have 10 minutes for each consultation. We rely on patients being on time to provide a good service. When a patient is late and still seen, this can have a significant effect on other patients being on time. The practice policy is that if a patient does not arrive within their booked 10 minute slot, they will be expected to rebook their appointment.

Doctors running late

Often doctors can be running late. Only having 10 minutes for each appointment is sometimes difficult to keep to. Doctors can often be counselling suicidal patients or letting a patient know about a serious cancer diagnosis amongst other situations that require more time. I’m sure most people would appreciate a little extra time during difficult appointments like this, so please be understanding and do not take out any frustrations on doctors or staff in this event.

Patients not attending appointments

If you cannot keep an appointment, please let us know so that we can allocate your slot to someone else. For those patients who have a mobile phone registered, they can text the surgery to cancel using their text reminder. There really is no excuse to miss an appointment.

We have a very strict policy when appointments are not attended. If this happens several times in a 12-month period, patients will be sent a letter from the practice manager asking them to be more careful in the future.

The letter will explain the impact this has on other patients and also warns that if more occurrences are seen, then further action will be taken. If those patients go on to miss more appointments, their continued registration at the practice will be reviewed by the GP Partners. This may result in a patient being removed, meaning they would have to register at a different surgery.