14 May 2021
Urban Village Medical Practice
Patient update
Appointments
Q: Is the practice open between 08:00—18:30?
A: Yes, we have been open throughout the pandemic.
Q: Does the practice offer patients face-to-face appointments?
A: Yes, we always have (see notes below) as to explanation around these appointments.
Q. Does a patient have to go to the website to complete a form to get an appointment?
A: No, the reception team will take you through the form if you are unable to complete this yourself.
Your GP Practice is OPEN
You would have seen plenty of information in the press regarding appointments in GP Practices, most of these are really negative. As a Practice who has worked so hard throughout this pandemic, we feel this is very unfair and we wanted to take this opportunity to be explain about the situation and our appointments.
Like many of you, we have had to work differently, this doesn’t mean we closed our doors and not cared for our patients, this would go against all our core values and mission statement.
The ‘different’ working means we call patients before they come to the surgery, this is called ‘telephone triage’, or ‘remote consulting’ this change had to happen because of:-
- This was an agreed plan with the NHS to make sure all our patients are safe
- This was to make sure all our staff are safe
Telephone triage has allowed us to safely assess clinically who needs a face to face appointment – YES we are still seeing patients.
There is nothing more important to us than providing you with the right healthcare, this means getting access to the right person to manage your problem in the right time frame.
Working in the background to support your journey are a dedicated team of doctors, nurses, health care assistants, pharmacists, managers, and administration staff who are working hard to keep EVERYONE safe.
Some days we find this extremely hard, but we are committed to providing all our patients with a good standard of care.
We are human, we have been scared and we are at risk with every patient that walks through our doors.
We truly do not deserve all the bad press as we do care what happens to our patients, but we do want your support to make sure we look after all our patients.
The overall demand on our appointment system has grown over the last couple of months and this does not seem to be slowing down. We have raised this with our local NHS as have many practices across the country. This concerns us because our staff are burning out and we don’t want our patient care to suffer
Please be kind to our staff
Please stay safe and look after yourself and your family.