PPG news

At this time of day the surgery is expecting to receive urgent patient requests, for example if your child has been ill overnight (although it should go without saying that in an emergency nor life-threatening situation you should be calling 999, not the surgery)

Phone calls and submissions via the Orchard website at are dealt with by ‘care navigators’ trained by the surgery to refer you as quickly as possible to the most appropriate service or individual. 

During this period a duty doctor works alongside the care navigator team to advise in cases where a patient’s treatment pathway is less obvious, so there’s more chance your initial face-to-face or telephone consultation should be right first time. 

The sheer volume of requests necessitates the telephone ‘call queue’. Submissions via the website are reviewed in real time by the care navigator and duty doctor as they come in, so you may prefer to consider this option if the queue is long. The website form is turned off later in the morning when available urgent appointments for that day are full. 

Although the phone lines remain open until 6pm – and appointments can also be booked at the front desk – those needing urgent attention are advised to call/visit in the morning, as calling later might not allow enough time to fit in an appointment within that day’s working hours. 

What about booking routine or follow-up appointments? Normally these can be booked up to two weeks ahead because that’s as far as Orchard’s duty rotas are scheduled. The surgery agrees it’s not ideal to ask patients 

to have to make their own diary note to make another appointment in, say, three months’ time, but experience shows booking appointments with long lead times leads to a higher incidence of patient ‘no shows’. 

Please cancel your appointment if you don’t need it. Another patient will be grateful you did so. And if your phone number changes, please tell the surgery, as they can’t send you appointment reminders without your correct number.