Update from the Practice Manager - June 2021

We continue to open our front door to enable patients to call into the vestibule to drop and collect prescriptions etc. We do encourage all patients to nominate a pharmacy so their prescriptions can go straight there and limit the footfall to the surgery. We also encourage patients to sign up for online prescription ordering. We no longer take telephone prescriptions requests over the telephone.

PRACTICE NURSES - Nurse appointments are being booked as normal but the nurse is allocated a longer appointment to give time for cleaning down after. This obviously reduces the number of appointments we can offer per day so patients may have to wait a little longer than usual for their appointment. The nurses continue to be extremely busy but are managing to see patients for annual reviews in a timely manner.

Starting from Tuesday 23^rd February the community phlebotomy service are running a blood test clinic from 8.30am – 12.30pm each week at Longroyde Surgery. These appointments will be shared between Longroyde and Rastrick Health Centre. We will no longer run the Wednesday nurse blood clinic so this will release more nursing appointments with our practice nurses. We will continue to run our nurse blood clinic on a Monday morning for the time being. We can still offer blood test appointments at Rastrick Health Centre in the evenings Monday to Friday and at Spring Hall Surgery in Halifax at weekends.

GPs –You can now book a face to face or telephone consultation with the GP without the need for telephone triage first. We ask that you tell the receptionist the reason for the appointment and DO NOT attend the surgery if your symptoms are Covid related.

Please arrive as near to your appointment time as possible and come alone unless you need support. Please wear a mask and sanitise your hands on entry. If you are late for your appointment you will need to re-book.  Appointments are strictly 10 minutes so that we do not get a build up of patients in the waiting room.

If you request a telephone appointment you will be given a definite time and the clinician will ring you around that time.  They will only ring you the once so if you miss the call you will need to re-book.

RECEPTION TEAM - The reception team are working very hard to answer the phone and deal with patient queries at the front hatch. We have two phone lines and these are always busy so we ask callers to be patient.