Information:
How to contact us - a message from the practice partners
At Lensfield Medical Practice we have been triaging on the day appointments for around 8 years. We created this system because the number of pre-booked appointments meant that we no longer had the capacity to safely manage the number of urgent appointments required each day. Since then, demand has continued to increase. During the covid pandemic, we were advised by NHS England to implement total triage for all appointments. We looked carefully at various models and in July 2020, started to use accurx online patient triage.
We ask all patients who are able to do so, to use the online system to contact us. After you complete and submit a simple online form it is sent directly to our duty team, and usually reviewed within 2 hours. The team will then contact you to arrange the appropriate next step, based on clinical need. We aim to contact you within one working day and ask you to contact us early in the day whenever possible, if your query is urgent. Requests received later in the day may receive a response on the next working day.
We may respond to your enquiry with a phonecall or a face to face appointment with a GP, pharmacist, minor illness nurse, practice nurse, paramedic or healthcare assistant. We may alternatively recommend that you seek treatment from another service, such as a dentist, a physiotherapist, the minor eye conditions service, the contraception and sexual health service, or the ‘Pharmacy First’ service. You will usually be notified of the outcome by text message or phone call within a few hours of your message being sent.
If you think that you are likely to require a urgent appointment on the same day that you are contacting us, we would ask that you submit the online form in the morning, as soon as possible after we open at 8am. Please keep your phone with you with the sound turned up so that we can contact you.
Routine online requests can be sent during core hours. For safety reasons, we ask patients with urgent requests to telephone rather than use the online form between 11.30am and 1.30pm, and after 5pm.
We recognise that some patients cannot use the internet or prefer to speak to a receptionist by phone or in person. The receptionist will record your enquiry, which will then be triaged in the same way by the duty doctor. Any patient who walks into the practice will offered a simple form to write down their enquiry, to maintain privacy. These enquiries will be triaged by the duty team in the same way as online requests, to ensure equal access to our services.
At Lensfield Medical Practice we have always believed that continuity of care is an important part of the Dr/patient relationship and we continue to strive to enable patients to see their 'usual doctor' whenever possible. If you are contacting us about an ongoing medical issue, we would usually try to book an appointment with a clinician who has been previously dealing with the problem. This may mean a longer wait for an appointment.
For a multitude of reasons, primary care is under a lot of pressure, and unfortunately, we can't see that things will change for the foreseeable future. We believe that patient triage is the only way that we can sustain a safe and accessible service for all of our patients based on clinical need. Please help us to help you most effectively.
