For those of you who are having trouble in getting through to the Surgery or feel that you are not offered an appointment as soon as you would like, we are listening to your comments and advise as follows:

Doctors

Each Doctor when on duty has 18 appointments in the morning and 18 appointments in the afternoon. These are made up of a mixture of urgent "on the day" slots;

• Slots that Nurses book into
• Slots for Doctors to book into for patients they are concerned about
• Slots for patients with Long Term Conditions and some pre-bookable appointments.

A Doctor also must deal with all Pathology results, Referrals, Clinic letters, Prescription queries, admin queries and tasks from the multi-disciplinary team members. All of this must be dealt with daily, when the doctor Is not seeing patients.

Nurses

Our Nurses have a mixture of book on day appointments and pre-bookable appointments, Each Nurse has their own speciality:

• One is more for Diabetes / Mental Health concerns /Female concerns e.g. Menopause
• And the other is our Respiratory Nurse, e.g. Asthma, COPD, breathing issues.

They both deal with all other routine Nurse appointments too.

We have a Healthcare Assistant who deals with routine Nurse appointments. All the team will see up to 15-20 patients in the morning AND afternoon during each of their shifts. They also must deal with queries from staff/patients, create blood test forms, assess readings patients have supplied for them, Referrals, Clinic letters, Audits and some prescription queries.

Reception & Admin

Our Reception/Admin Team work non-stop during their shifts, taking continuous phones calls, queries from patients which may then need to be passed to another staff member. They deal  with all admin  duties too, including completing referrals from a Clinician, making referrals that  are within their scope,  completing all repeat prescription requests, dealing with tasks from  Clinicians, making calls, texts,  letters  to patients, inviting patients for screening clinics,  scanning all documents on to patient records - the list  is endless.  Therefore, as I hope you will appreciate, the working day is extremely long, and everyone is  working as hard as they  possibly can to accommodate as many of our 10500 patients every  day of the  working week.

We appreciate how upset and frustrated you may feel at times, but please bear in mind just how hard we are all working and trying our very best to care for you, our patients.