"On hold for a long time / Then no appointments"

Thank you for contacting us with regard to your feedback about our services.

I would like to apologise that you are unhappy with the service you received.

Our telephone system had a programming error that became apparent after a few weeks.

It took time to identify what the fault related to but it was then fixed.

Unfortunately, we have recently realised that the problem has reoccurred and we are working hard to resolve this issue, once again.

We have also now recruited additional members of reception staff to help deal with high levels of calls.

On average we receive in excess of 5000 calls on a Monday, and usually over 3250 each other working day.

We are acutely aware that patients are waiting a long time for their call to be answered for which we would like to apologise, and to reassure you we are working to reduce this time.

In order to try to meet the demand for GP appointments, we have invested significantly in meeting the urgent demand we have for appointments each day.

If a patient has something that needs to be treated that day, then this will be triaged by our duty team and dealt with either over the telephone, by an appointment that day in the duty hub at St Andrews or by appointment in a normal clinic in the following days.

By recruiting more clinicians to work with our on-the-day demand, we are able to free up more routine GP appointments for our patients.

We have also introduced a new appointment system with our GPs, and these are designed to help with your planned care.

If your GP does not have an appointment that fits with your time requirement, you are able to book an appointment with a number of GPs who do not have their own list of patients or with a number of locums that we use to help manage demand.

This group of GPs are now focussing on demand for care within a week, with the duty hub picking up the urgent on-the-day care, and your GP focussing on long term patient care.