Surgery Update

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The surgery sent this update out to patients on the evening of 23rd March 2022

Dear patient,

We are writing to notify you of some upcoming changes within Solent GP Surgery; as COVID restrictions have been eased we have been reviewing our practice systems to enable us to begin transformation back in to a more traditional way of working whilst retaining the some of the different ways of working we have found to be beneficial during the pandemic.

These last couple of months have been an extremely challenging time within the surgery with high levels of sickness due to COVID which has caused levels of service to fluctuate drastically and sadly has impacted on the service we have been able to provide. We wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for your understanding when we have had to reduce our usual service in order to continue to provide urgent care to those who are most vulnerable and unwell.

Routine Appointments

In order to be able to make the necessary changes to our appointment system we have had to close the eConsult service until Monday 28th March and are not making any further routine bookings for GP appointments until this time. However, our urgent care system is still operating as normal so please contact us by telephone if you require urgent care in this time.

From Monday 28th March we will be re-instating a pre-booked appointment model; in order to obtain an appointment with a clinician you will be asked to complete an eConsult, once the eConsult is received by the practice our admin team will book an appointment using a care navigation document which has been created by our clinical team. In most cases you will be booked a telephone consultation in the first instance and you will receive a text confirmation from our team of the date this is booked for, if you do not have a mobile number on record our admin team will call you on the number we have listed for you. Unfortunately we will not be able to state an exact time as the clinician will prioritise the most urgent issues booked in their clinic on the day, but they will state whether you will be called in the morning or afternoon. Please keep your phone to hand, if you miss the call the first time the clinician will only try a second time.

We understand not everyone has access to the internet therefore if you cannot do an eConsult and do not have a family member or friend that can help you then please telephone the surgery and our Reception team will complete an eConsult with you over the phone. They will need to ask you questions in relation to your medical concern as this will help them book you in with the correct clinician and also give the clinician insight to your medical concern prior to the appointment; the more information you can give our team the better as this will give the clinician background to your medical concern and allow you more time in the consultation to discuss treatment.

We ask if you do have access to the internet that you complete an eConsult via our practice website to reduce waiting times on the telephone lines for those who do need to contact us by telephone.
After your initial appointment if you require a follow up appointment the clinician will book this for you whilst on the telephone or if you are seeing a clinician face to face at one of our sites they will give you an information slip to book at our front desk on your wait out of the surgery.

Urgent Care

We are also making a small change to our urgent care system with immediate effect. From Thursday 24th March we will be implementing a cut off time for our urgent care service; if you require care for an urgent issue you will need to contact the surgery by telephone by 11:00 a.m. This will allow our urgent care team to manage their workload for the day and prioritise patients with the most urgent need. All urgent care appointments are managed as a telephone appointment in the first instance and the clinicians will invite you in for a face to face examination if it is necessary.

Telephone System

We are awaiting the installation of a new telephone system in the practice; we have heard your feedback and understand this is a cause of frustration for many of our patients. The new system will allow us to monitor busy times and enable to us to amend staffing levels to meet these trends. As soon as we have further information on the new telephone system, we will let you know.
We love to hear feedback from our patients and encourage you to let us know when you have had an excellent experience or when things haven’t worked so well so we can improve our service.

Yours sincerely,
Solent GP Surgery

Published: Mar 24, 2022