Home visits are for patients too ill to attend surgery. If you feel you need a home visit please contact the surgery before 10am to enable the clinician to plan their calls. Visits to patients’ homes will be made at the clinicians discretion not the patients. All home visits will be added to the triage list, It will be the clinicians decision if a home visit is required. If you do not accept the call you will not get a home visit, no home visit will be done unless triage has occurred. Please remember that it is your responsibility to arrange transport to see a clinician, having no car or waiting for a service man to call are not reasons to request a home visit. If you lack transport, please ask friends or family to help. We do have evening appointments available when many people have finished work and may be able to bring you. By making every effort to come to the surgery you help us greatly to provide a better service for all our patients.

Visiting patients at home is very time consuming - we can see three or four patients in the surgery in the time it takes to see one person at home. It is often difficult to examine patients at home, difficult to carry out tests and our surgery equipment is obviously not available. We can give you a much better service if you come to the surgery.

We understand that it can often be difficult to attend at the surgery, but we cannot take this into account alone in most cases. The needs of ALL patients needs to be taken into consideration and we have to use our judgement on priorities.

So that we can more easily identify urgent cases that may need emergency care at the hospital or are in need of an urgent GP assessment, when you ring for a visit please give as much information as possible. Callers may find the following checklist helpful:

Please tell us:

• The caller's name and contact information
• Patient's name, address, location and contact details

To help prioritise your call please give:

• When symptoms started
• List of symptoms
• How often symptoms being experienced
• Names and dosages of medication and when taken

Our Response

The call taker will pass all information to the clinician. We may contact you for more information.

One of the following may happen:

• Ambulance
• Clinician call-back
• Visit to assess the patient
• Self treatment advice
• Hospital referral
• A prescription
• Other advice or action, as appropriate