Appointments

All the Doctors and Nurses work to appointments

Demand for appointments has increased over the years; we are still trying to keep up with demand and have made major changes to the appointment system to provide a faster and better service. There are 4 types of appointments.

Book on the day appointments

Book on the day appointments are available by ringing 0151 327 1391 each morning from 08:00. These are usually for more urgent matters that cannot wait until a routine appointment is available. We cannot guarantee that you will be able to see the doctor of your choice, although we will try to accommodate your request.

Pre-Bookable/Routine appointments

Routine appointments are limited. These are for non-urgent matters and for patients who prefer to have continuity by seeing the doctor who has been looking after an on-going problem. These can be pre-booked up to 4 weeks in advanced if available.

Duty Doctor appointments

Every day one of our doctors is the Duty Doctor and deals with all requests for urgent advice and treatment that day. If all the 'Book on the Day' appointments have been taken, the Duty Doctor deals with anyone who feels unable to wait until another day. The Reception Team will take a telephone number (a land-line number is preferred) and the Duty Doctor will ring back. The doctor has the ability to offer an appointment if necessary or give telephone advice.

Nurse Telephone Triage

Advice is given to you on the phone by our nurse. If our nurse feels this warrants an appointment with either her or a GP she will offer you an appointment if necessary on that day or at the earliest convient time.

Golden Rules For Appointments

• If you decide that your appointment is no longer needed, please ring up and cancel so that someone else can have the appointment instead.
• Does more than one family member need to see the doctor? If so, please make a separate appointment for each person.
• If you have several different problems to discuss, please make a longer appointment or separate appointments. Your doctor has only 10 minutes for each routine consultation.
• If you are more than 10 minutes late for your appointment your appointment will be cancelled and you will have to rebook.

Chaperone

If appropriate a GP will offer you the opportunity for a chaperone to be present or you can request this service yourself.

Reception

The receptionists are here to help you. To ensure that they can assist you as efficiently as possible, they may need to ask for further details or check information in your medical records when you telephone the surgery.They are bound by the same rules of confidentiality as the doctors and nurses. Please appreciate that receptionists are not qualified to discuss your clinical care but they will do their best to point you in the right direction. Please show the same courtesy to them as with all members of the team.

Non Attenders

We offer over 1000 appointments per week and of these a percentage are wasted because patients do not attend.

All non attenders appointments are monitoring and letters sent accordingly. If you are a non attender on a regular basis you may be removed from the practice list.

Home Visits

If possible please try to telephone reception before 11:00 if you require a home visit.

A doctor or nurse may phone you back as it may be that your problem can be dealt with by telephone advice, or that it would be more appropriate to send a nurse, or indeed arrange a hospital attendance.

House visits are only available for patients who are housebound because of illness or disability.

Please remember that several patients can be seen in the practice in the time that it takes to make one home visit. There are also better facilities for examining and treating patients at the surgery.

GP Training

We are honoured to be a designated teaching practice which involves having medical students from the University of Liverpool. Occasionally, we may ask your permission for you to participate in their teaching programme.

Students often learn more from their patients than their tutors and books! You can be involved in the medical learning of our future doctors, for the benefit of future patients. It is of great benefit for the students to learn from you in this way, but we will always respect your decision if you do not feel comfortable with this. Please inform the staff if you do not wish to be seen by a medical student.