From October 2011, we have made a few changes to the way the practice works to cope with demand better and hopefully you will notice a greater variety of appointment times offered.

• We will offer more minor illness appointments with our specialist nurses Mary Elliot and Jenni Murray. They can both prescribe medications.
• We will offer appointments earlier on most days at 8.30am and on some days as early as 8am! This will hopefully help our patients who would like to be seen before work.
• We will offer appointments on some days in the early part of the afternoon, before children have to be picked up from school.
• We are finishing slightly earlier with our latest pre-booked appointment being at 6pm rather than 6.20pm. We will continue to see emergencies up to 6.30pm.
• From May 2012 we are offering later appointments every Monday evening and alternate Wednesdays until 7.30pm.
• From May 2012 we are offering Saturday morning appointments on the second Saturday of each month.

Alongside revising the times of appointments we have also looked at how you can book appointments.

• You will be able to book more appointments in advance and will be able to pre-book appointments up to 6 weeks in advance.
• More appointments will be available to be booked online. If you haven’t signed up for online booking ask reception.
• We will be trialing an appointment card system that your doctor or nurse will give you to arrange your next appointment.
• We will continue to promote our text reminder system for appointments. If you have not signed up for this and would like to ask reception.

Our reception team are vital to make these changes work smoothly. The doctors have asked reception to triage appointments. This means that they will ask you about your problem. Our receptionists have all been trained to help the doctors and nurses identify when and how they can best respond to your request and will treat all information as totally confidential. Obviously if you would rather not say what the appointment is for you do not have to but we do need to know if it is an emergency or if you wish to see a nurse (as all our nurses offer different services).