KEPT WAITING?

We appreciate you have taken time out of your day for your appointment.

We understand that you have other responsibilities and deadlines to meet and that you may have taken time off work for your appointment.

We apologise if you are kept waiting and appreciate your patience.

We do our best to keep the surgeries running on time.

See below some of the reasons why you might be kept waiting.

If you would rather wait in your car please phone reception and we can call you when the doctor or nurse is ready to see you.

Our standard consultations are 15 minutes long. During this time we can safely deal with one or two issues. Some patients may have multiple problems or the single problem may be very complex. If you think this is the case please tell our receptionist when booking so an extended consultation can be arranged.

While often unavoidable, patients can sometimes present late for their appointment. this has a knock-on effect on every other appointment time that comes after them.

Urgent extra consultations happen every single day. Although we have a contingency for this, urgent cases such as sick children are unpredictable and are facilitated in an unscheduled time between appointments.

Urgent house calls are sometimes needed and can be in the middle of a booked surgery. These can take a minimum of 45 minutes, thus delaying appointments. The other doctors may have to help see some of the absent doctors appointments as well as their own, thus delaying all surgeries.

We receive urgent phone calls throughout the day, either from patients, relatives, hospital doctors, public health nurses, pharmacists, laboratories and nursing homes. Again these take time.

We sometimes in the position of breaking bad news, or someone may be dealing with difficult emotional problems which take time, and which we do not want to rush.