Appointments with a doctor or a member of our nursing team are by appointment only. Appointments can be pre-booked for up to four weeks ahead. We also offer urgent appointments on the day.

Urgent Appointments

If you have a sudden need to see the doctor and cannot wait for a normal appointment, please try to ring the surgery at 08:00 for on the day appointments.

Church View Surgery 01268 774477         

The Jones Family Practice 01702 202514

Although this is a group practice, you will be a registered patient at either the Hockley or the Rayleigh surgery. Generally the doctors work from one or the other of the surgeries. However, when there are holidays or absences, you may be offered an appointment with one of the other practice doctors. It is preferable that patients and doctors get to know each other well but occasionally there are no vacant appointments with the doctor of your choice. If this happens you will be offered the first available appointment with another doctor. The doctors rely on the documented notes and you will find continuity of care with each doctor.

Please remember to:

• Arrive on time for your appointment
• Make a separate appointment for each person to be seen
• Let the receptionist know if you feel you may need a longer-than-usual appointment
• Cancel any appointment you are unable to keep well in advance so that there is time to offer this to another patient.

Interpreter

If you require an interpreter to attend with you when you see the Doctor please notify the receptionist and they will arrange this for you.

We are now able to offer GP appointments from 18:30 - 20:00 Monday – Friday.

These appointments will be available to book 3 days in advance and will be held at local surgeries across Castle Point & Rochford including Church View Surgery & The Jones Family Practice.

Our receptionists have all received recent training and are now able to care navigate.

Care navigation ensures that patients are seen and treated by the correct professional.   This may not always be a GP; it could be a nurse or healthcare assistant.  It may be that advice is given to speak to a pharmacist or an alternative care provider.

To ensure successful care navigation, our receptionists have been trained to enquire the reason for the appointment request.  This will also ensure that the correct length of appointment is allocated with the most suitable person.

Your doctor is available to speak on the telephone if necessary, but prefers not to be disturbed during surgery. Please telephone the surgery where the receptionist will take the details of your request. The doctor will then call you back at a convenient point in their day.

Nurses are also available for telephone advice. The receptionist will take your number and the nurse will call you back when she is free.

When our assessment tells us that a referral is necessary we prefer to use the "Choose and Book" referral method. This means that we would have determined through our GP assessment if the referral is routine, urgent or within 2 weeks, GPs have little power to change the appointment. The patient has a number to ring for such matters, allowing the patient to deal with a change of date.

It is important that you inform the reception staff if you are unable to attend your appointment, this will allow that appointment to be offered to another patient. If you fail to notify the Practice that you are unable to attend, you will be sent a letter informing you that you have defaulted from your appointment. Persistent defaulters maybe removed from the list.

You can also complete our appointment cancellation notification request form. This can only be used if your appointment has been arranged for more than 24 hours in advance. (excluding weekends and public holidays). You can also text to cancel your appointment.

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Please attend your appointment on time, if you are late you may not be seen. If you are not seen you will have to rearrange your appointment for another date.

Home visits are available for anyone who is too ill to come to the surgery and should be the exception rather than the rule. If at all possible please try to attend the surgery where you will find that the GPs can do more than they could do at your own home. Whenever possible please request a visit before 10.00am. This enables the doctors to plan their day. Visits are distributed amongst the doctors on duty and the doctor may phone you prior to visiting to assess why a home visit is needed and also so the doctor may be able to go prepared.

Please do not leave home visit requests on the surgery answerphone. Home visits are meant to be for your clinical urgent needs so the visiting doctor may not be able to deal with some non-clinical matters such as medical certificates, insurance paperwork etc.

An audit that we performed last year showed us that as many as 48% of our home visits were unnecessary and in our assessment the patient could have visited the surgery. An ordinary surgery consultation usually lasts 10 minutes where as a home visit takes 30 minutes including travel. If we had a fleet of doctors then there would be no problems in some doctors undertaking home visits and some doing the surgery consultation. Unfortunately our working is driven in terms of budgeting. It is the same number of doctors that we have who do both tasks - surgery consultations and home visits.

Some examples of home visits have been for wound dressings, arranging social care or help in bringing forward a hospital appointment. The dressing could have been done by the district nurse and the other requests over the phone by the reception team or with a telephone appointment with the nurse or doctor. These things are clarified by a preliminary phone call.