Noticeboard

In February 2017 there were 72 appointments wasted by patients who failed to turn up to pre-booked appointments.

Please le us know in good time if you are not going to be able to attend your appointment so we can offer it to someone else.

Welcome to Pinehill Surgery Online

Our doctors, nurses and all our other staff are dedicated to offering high quality clinical care and this surgery website will help us to keep all our patients up to date with news and information about our practice.

As well as a source of information about our practice, we hope you will use this website as a useful resource for other health-related information. Please have a look at the web-site and do send us some feedback. We can use your ideas to improve our online services and further develop the content.

NOW LIVE - eConsult (also known as Web GP) - a new way to contact your doctor for advice.

Do it Online!

Order prescriptions or make/cancel appointments online. Please select 'Do it Online!' under Further Information on the right hand side of this screen .

Are your contact details up to date?

It is important that we have up to date contact information for all our patients. We are currently undertaking an exercise to ensure that we have the right mobile phone numbers, emails etc. to help improve communications. We will shortly be starting to use a more comprehensive texting service to mobile phone numbers which will enable you to respond directly into our clinical system e.g. to cancel an appointment. Please complete a form at Reception and hand it in so we can check your records.

Changes to Phlebotomy (blood taking)

From Thursday 8th June you will be asked to go to Chase Hospital for blood tests instead of having them done by our nursing team here in the Practice. This change will free up our nursing team considerably and relieve pressure on appointments including for the doctors as our Nurse Practitioner will have more capacity to see minor illnesses. We hope this change will be a positive one for all concerned but please let us have any comments or suggestions - there is a box on Reception for this. This will help us with forward planning and we will also feedback any relevant comments to Southern Health (who are running the service) and/or our Clinical Commissioning Group (SEHCCG) who are responsible for commissioning the service.

Travelling Abroad?

Please go to Clinics & Services to access information on travel vaccines and when you should contact us.

Requesting Prescriptions

Please do not request repeat medication over the telephone.

The Reception team are not allowed to take these requests and doing so is a serious disciplinary matter.

There are sound medical/legal reasons for the Surgery having this policy which is there for your protection and safety.

There are a number of ways in which you can request your repeat prescriptions:

Bring the order slip in (the right hand side of your previous prescription) and post in the box on Reception or through the letter box in the door nearest the car park
If you have lost the slip, there are order forms on the Reception desk for you to complete
You can fax your request: 01420 489471
You can ask your regular pharmacy to order your prescriptions for you.
You can sign up for our on-line service - see Do it Online! on the right hand side of this page

Please allow 72 hours for processing

Missed Appointments

Approximately 75 appointments per month are ‘Did Not Attend’ (DNA), i.e. the patient does not turn up for the appointment and does not contact the surgery in advance to cancel/change appointment. The effect of these are:

An increase in the waiting time for appointments
Frustration for both staff and patients
A waste of NHS resources
A potential risk to the health of the patient

From 1st April 2017 in an effort to reduce these levels we will be implementing stricter controls. Every patient who fails to attend a booked appointment without notice will receive a warning letter. Any patient who misses two or more appointments in a any12 month period will receive further written warnings and may be invited to meet with the Practice Manager and/or a GP to discuss matters. Ultimately if a patient fails to attend 3 or more appointments without notice they will be at risk of being removed from out list.

We can send SMS text reminders for appointments to patients providing you have let us have your up to date details.

On the Day Telephone Consultations - Help us to Help you.

Please note these are for URGENT problems - and if you consider your problem is urgent you should be available to answer the phone as soon as the doctor calls you and be available to attend the Surgery if the doctor feels he/she needs to examine you.

If this is not possible then your call is probably not urgent and you should book a routine appointment or use the e-Consult/Web GP button on this screen as an alternative method of contacting the GP direct.

Currently a lot of time and resource is wasted with calls not being answered the first time the doctor calls.

EPS - Electronic Prescription Service

is now live. For more information please speak to your usual pharmacy, pick up a leaflet from Reception or go to:

http://systems.hscic.gov.uk/eps/library/patientfact.pdf

FOR INFORMATION - Our practice list is OPEN. The Surgery list is open for registrations of new patients.

All GP practices are required to declare the mean earnings (e.g. average pay) for GPs working to deliver NHS services to patients at each practice.

The average pay for GPs working in Pinehill Surgery in the last financial year was £46,209 before tax and National Insurance. This is for 3 part time GPs who worked in the practice for more than six months.

PLEASE NOTE, when the surgery is CLOSED and you require medical assistance which cannot wait until the surgery re-opens, please hang up and dial 111.

Calls to this number are free from landlines and mobiles.

If you have a life threatening medical emergency please dial 999.