At Bewick Crescent Surgery we are revising the way you access NHS services for Doctors’ appointments. We recognise our patients can be met with frustrating long telephone queues and experience difficulties acquiring an appointment. The new changes, commencing Monday 24 January 2022, will help to alleviate both challenges, improving your access.
We are adopting a total triage appointment model which means every request for a GP appointment will be triaged by a GP the same day (if received before 5pm). During the day our GPs will review your medical issue, decide the next step in your care, through advice or arranging a further consultation (telephone or face-to-face appointment), which will be communicated back to you via one of our reception team.
You can request an appointment in two ways, electronically or by calling us. There are two ways of submitting electronic requests. You can go to our website homepage and click on the eConsult banner if the request is for you alone. Alternatively, you can use the NHS App to submit an electronic submission by clicking the ‘Ask Your GP For Advice’ option. When using the NHS App you can also submit a request for your child. Consultations take between five and ten minutes to complete and will be reviewed the same day by our triaging GP (if submitted before 5pm). You can submit an electronic consultation during the following days and times: Monday to Friday, 7.30 to 11:59am, 1-5pm and 7-8pm (outside of this the service will not be available). There may be times when eConsult does not let you continue your consultation and may ask you to phone into the surgery normally to address a potential urgent requirement.
Alternatively, you can continue to call our receptionists but this should be used as a last resort and on behalf of someone else. Our receptionists will ask you a series of questions and then submit your consultation to the triaging doctor to assess the next step in your care. If you do decide to use the telephone method you increase the risk of continuing to experience long waits. Telephone enquiries will continue to be open from 8am – 6pm as it is now.
Ultimately, the new model offers you the opportunity to access our services throughout the day, receive a response about your care the same day and avoid the ‘bottleneck’ at 8am. Waiting in a queue for appointments will now be a choice for most and we hope to eliminate legacy models that ask patients to try day after day to try and acquire an appointment. We look forward to 24th January 2022 whilst we continue to strive to make our surgery a better patient experience.