Routine appointments are for non-urgent problems. Patients will be offered a pre-bookable telephone consultation with a GP. If the GP feels that a face to face consultation is required, they will discuss this with you during your telephone consultation and a convenient appointment will be agreed.
Our telephone-first approach helps us offer more appointments each day. Telephone consultations take less time than in-person appointments, which means each GP can offer up to 32 appointments per day, compared with 24 if all appointments were face-to-face.
This enables us to help more patients, more quickly.
We regularly review and audit our appointment system. Our most recent audit showed:
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Only 1 in 4 telephone consultations required a follow-up face-to-face appointment.
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Waiting times were significantly shorter with the telephone-first system — even for patients who later needed an in-person review.
