Dear Patients

Some of you will be aware that we have in the last few days, changed our telephone system.  New telephone systems now all come with message facilities as standard – this is to improve your experience in as much as, rather than potentially having a telephone just ring and ring if we are very busy in reception (which is incredibly frustrating for everyone!). Here you will hear a welcome message which invites you to either hold on or call back later.

This is NOT an answerphone message, so if you do wish to hold, please do so and a receptionist will be with you.

If however, you require urgent medical assistance, for example if you have chest pain or shortness of breath, you should hang up and dial 999.  An additional benefit for us is that if we need to transfer you to another site for whatever reason, we can now do so without the need for you to hang up and call a second surgery line.

We have naturally had to change the telephone system across our three sites and link them across a network.  We are very sorry if anyone has experienced a less than satisfactory call to the surgery over the past couple of days but the engineers remain on site and we are confident that any teething troubles will be sorted before the weekend.

Nicola Hayward, Practice Manager