5th August 2024
Dear Patients
Boughton Surgery is joining with most other General Practice units across the country in a national programme of collective action, in order to secure better funding for us to serve our patients safely.
The whole purpose of this action is to demonstrate to the Government the enormous workload that we cannot manage and the long-term underfunding that has caused this.
The first part of this action is that we shall be following the British Medical Association’s National Guidance of Safe Clinical Practice which states that it is unsafe for a doctor to see more than 25 patients per day. This will mean that there are a restricted number of appointments available each day to make that a possibility.
Our responsibility is to assist our patients not only with their urgent health needs but more importantly with their long-term chronic needs which we are best placed to deal with. Therefore, the appointments every day will be geared towards dealing with those long term chronic routine problems primarily and only a small proportion of the appointments will be for urgent matters.
All urgent requests will be triaged first thing from 08.00am onwards but when our urgent appointments are filled the service will be deemed at maximum capacity and no further urgent care contacts will be available. Patients will be directed to seek urgent health care from other support services such as 111, Accident and Emergency, or in some cases from community pharmacy.
However, we will open Footfall and our appointment systems at a later point in the day, between 2 and 3pm, when patients can put in requests for ROUTINE APPOINTMENTS ONLY. A routine appointment is deemed as a request which does not need to be clinically addressed within the next seven days. Please be aware that these requests will also be triaged and if it is deemed that the request relates to an issue that is urgent enough to require clinical input sooner than seven days, the patient will be instructed to seek help elsewhere in order to minimise the risk of delayed treatment.
All of this is being done to enable to keep you, the patients, safe and at the same time to emphasise to the Government that there is a huge need for further support at primary care level.
We do of course apologise for any inconvenience this action may cause. However, we feel it is essential to make this stand to save your primary care service. Help us to keep you safe by understanding and adopting our new appointment policy.
Sincerely,
Dr Uma Senior Partner
