PATIENT CONTRACT: SURGERY and PATIENT COPY

This document sets out information about how we provide care at The Limes Medical Centre, and how we hope to work together. We would ask you to read and sign this document.

Consultations

The practice runs an appointment system for all consultations. Please ask for more than one appointment if you want more than one patient to be seen by a doctor. Appointments are booked for 10 minutes. This makes the system fairer for everyone because other patients do not have an unreasonable wait because the GP is overrun. For further information refer to the Practice leaflet.

Consultation time is precious, so try not to bring to many problems to one appointment. If the doctor has to deal with an emergency, your appointment may be delayed. If this happens you will be offered the opportunity of either waiting or rebooking.

Cancelling Appointments

If you make an appointment to see your GP and then are unable to attend, please ring the surgery beforehand. If possible you should ring 24 hours before, so that we can make this appointment available to other patients. Patients who fail to attend two booked appointments within a six month period without cancelling will be asked to register with another practice.
Please also ensure that if you have an appointment at the hospital and you are unable to attend it, that you cancel this appointment as well.

Late Attendance

Will you please make every effort to ensure that you attend the practice at the time of your appointment. Patients who attend more than 5 minutes late may be asked to either wait until the end of surgery or make a further appointment for another day. The doctors do endeavour to run their surgeries to time.

Continuity of Care

The practice endeavours to offer its patients the best medical service and care at all times and as a part of this all consultations (with the exception of times when the GP is absent or you are asking for an emergency on the day appointment) should be with your own GP and not with another.

Home visits during surgery hours

Home visits are for patients who are housebound or too ill to come to the surgery. Please telephone the surgery before 10.00am so that the doctors can organize their rounds, unless a genuine emergency arises. The GP does most visits after morning surgery. Visits at other times should be for emergencies, not for problems that are several days old.

Telephone calls

When making contact with the practice by telephone, we ask you to keep them as brief and to the point as possible in order that other patients can also make contact with us. For test results please phone after 2pm.

Prescribing drugs of addiction

It is practice policy NOT to prescribe such drugs. We will refer patients with these needs to a specialist centre for management of their addiction.

Repeat Prescriptions

The practice deals with hundreds of repeat prescriptions every week. Please allow 3 complete working days for us to process any requests for repeat prescriptions. If your prescription is collected by a pharmacy please allow 4 complete working days. If you are requesting by post the postal times would need to be added (in that case allow 5-6 working days). Also because of potential serious errors we will NOT accept prescriptions over the telephone.

ONLY MEDICATIONS PREVIOUSLY AGREED BY YOUR DOCTOR can be requested this way.

Change of personal details

It is important that we are told of any changes to your personal details, including telephone number, and we would ask that you either come to the surgery and complete a change of address/name form or write to us to advise us. Proof is required before any changes can be made.

Out of Hours Service

When the practice is closed you can contact NHS 111 for medical advice. This can be done by dialing 111. Please do not telephone out of hours unless it is an emergency that cannot wait until the next day – usually when the surgery re-opens first thing in the morning.

Expected behaviour

It is our endeavour to offer the best medical service to patients at all times and that this should be done by our staff with compassion and politeness. We anticipate that our patients will reciprocate and treat our staff with consideration and politeness. Should any patient use abusive language or threatening behaviour towards any member of the practice, then we reserve the right to remove them from the practice’s list forth with.

I have read the patient contract and agreed to my obligations.

Patients name.

Patients signature: Click mark with an X here to agree to sign electronically 

Date: 14 October 2020