Medication & Appointments

With Covid infection rates subsiding coupled with the vaccination programme going so well we are planning to return some services back to normal.

We will go back to a three day turnaround for repeat prescriptions starting this week.

We will restart doing repeat prescription reviews on patients. Therefore red stickers will start being put back on repeat prescription slips. Medication reviews can be done either on the phone or face to face depending on the clinical need.

Regarding the number of people in the surgery at any one time we still need to restrict numbers in the waiting room. Therefore, we can’t return to a normal appointment service at the moment. Moreover the pandemic has shown us that a lot of interactions can be managed perfectly adequately over the phone which is a good use of time both for the practice and the patients. However, we are also very aware that some problems are best managed in a face to face consultation. Therefore, in order to try to obtain the correct balance of phone and face to face consultations we are going to start asking patients if they feel they need a face to face consultation or a phone call to deal with their problem. We are hoping this will serve everyone better but will continue to limit the numbers in the waiting room sufficiently to allow everyone to maintain safe social distancing. We will monitor the numbers of people in the waiting room and if we feel the numbers become too large we may have to return to the telephone triage system we have been running for the last year.