Appointments

How to make an appointment?

You can make an appointment via the following ways:

  • By visiting Appointments. Your request will be assessed and assigned to the best person to help you with your concern.
  • Booking an appointment via SystmOne. You will need to be registered for our online services. Please complete our Register for Online Services form to use this option.
  • By calling the practice on 01594 845715.

Please arrive on time for pre-booked appointments taking into account logistical difficulties or the time involved in travelling to the surgery. If you arrive late you will need to re-book your appointment.

Cancelling an Appointment

Please inform us promptly in the event of a cancellation so that we can allocate the appointment to another patient. You can do so online by completing the Cancel an Appointment form.

Changes To Our Appointment System

In order to try and make it easier to understand and improve access to the doctors we have changed our GP appointment system:

Routine Appointments

These are pre-booked and you will know the time and the doctor.

Telephone Appointments

Since the COVID-19 pandemic the bulk of the appointments for the GPs have been moved to telephone calls. There are appointments for routine telephone calls with each GP throughout the morning and afternoon, used to discuss results, letters and other routine matters. There are also appointments for same-day issues that run throughout the day. If you wish to speak with a GP, reception will book you in for an initial telephone call and should the GP decide you need to be seen face to face, they will offer you an appointment to come in to the surgery while on the phone with you. Please make sure you give reception the correct contact details and a reason for the call when booking the appointment.

Increased Access

The increased access scheme allows for patients to be booked in for acute (afternoons) and routine (weekend and evenings) appointments with GPs and nurses at any of the surgeries within the Forest of Dean Cluster. To book these you will need to contact the reception team who will offer the available appointments and inform you who it will be with, the time of the appointment and where the clinic is being held. Please note that currently due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Increased Access scheme is only able to run the afternoon clinics.

Whilst we try to run to time, our philosophy is that patients will be given the time they need regardless of whether the doctor is running late.

Appointments may also be booked for the practice nurse, HCAs and midwife.

Practice Nurse Appointments

The nursing team are taking on more and more of the care previously and traditionally carried out by doctors. Their roles are therefore expanding and their appointments ever more precious.

We also have qualified health care assistants in Sharon Hall and Christine Johnston who work alongside the nursing team to provide additional care to our patients. Their duties include but are not limited to taking bloods, blood pressure readings, B12 injections, minor dressings, ECGs and some annual reviews. Our reception staff are trained to put you in with the best suited practitioner for your needs and availability.

We have 2 Practice Nurses who have taken advanced training in Long Term Conditions, including Asthma, COPD and Diabetes.

Telephoning the Practice

If you need to speak to a doctor please phone 01594 845715 to make an appointment for a telephone consultation. The bulk of appointments are currently being completed via telephone appointments. We ask that you are sure to give reception the best contact number and a reason for your appointment as this will assist the doctors when they come to your call. Please note that calls from the surgery come from a withheld or private number.

Like all businesses, we find our telephone lines are busier at some times than others. The following information may help you when contacting us by telephone.

Our lines are busiest between 08:30 and 09:30 each morning and between 14:00 and 14:30 each afternoon. The dispensary telephone line is only open between 15:00 and 17:00 for medication and prescription queries.

Private Appointments

Limited private appointments are available only for patients who are not registered with the doctors of the practice for NHS care.

Automated Check-In

We have a wall mounted self check-in facility. This very easy to use touch screen device has been wall mounted in our waiting room. Patients can use this to record their arrival for any appointment. Patients are prompted to enter their month, then day of birth. Then they are asked to confirm their appointment.

Please be assured, your details cannot be viewed by others.

We hope that this will reduce queue lengths at our reception desk and allow our reception staff to continue with admin work away from the front desk. Please be assured, our reception staff will be available to help you if necessary. Do ring the bell on the reception desk if you cannot attract their attention.

Our Appointment System

A little information about how our appointment system is set up.

We have two full time General Practitioner (GP) partners at this practice and one salaried GP. In addition to seeing patients at the surgery, our doctors have to fit in the following work:

  • Home visits
  • Medical reports
  • Patient referral letters
  • Dealing with correspondence regarding patients
  • Processing and checking repeat prescription requests
  • Clinical audit work
  • Continuing education and update
  • Negotiation and correspondence with the Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and Care Quality Commission (CQC)
  • Monitoring of performance against Department of Health targets
  • Appraisals
  • General administration of practice business

Our GPs are also involved in the following activities outside practice time:

  • Out of hours shifts
  • Medical politics
  • Meetings
  • Continuous professional learning
  • Private medical work at patients’ request, e.g. medical examinations, medical reports, certification

As you will appreciate, the doctors’ time needs to be carefully managed in order to fit everything into their schedule.

We try to offer a range of appointment times and modes of access to GP advice, to cater for the great majority of our patients. Our doctors have set their holiday entitlement within the partnership to maximise time available for patients and the above work, while ensuring they get rest away from the practice to achieve a safe work-life balance. We make use of locum doctors to cover gaps in appointment provision where and when required.

Our practice nurse team is a great resource to us and an appointment with one of them is often an appropriate alternative to a GP. Our reception staff are able to guide patients in deciding if this might be appropriate if given some idea of the issue. If a patient feels they need to be urgently seen, we will do our very best to accommodate them. In order to get the best from our appointment system, we need to monitor the number of wasted appointments. We request that patients do their best to let us know as early as possible when they cannot attend a booked appointment so that it can be offered to somebody else. Appointments can be cancelled via speaking with the reception team, online or through our cancellation voicemail that is monitored continually (please note that we cannot rearrange appointments or book a new appointment through the cancellation voicemail service).

Patients should be aware that if too many appointments are missed without prior warning or cancelling, this may result in you being removed from the surgery’s patient list.

Patients wishing to use the online services should ask our reception staff for the necessary passwords needed to register via our website by completing the Register for Online Services form. Where patients feel a query can be addressed by talking to a doctor by telephone, this can be arranged with one of our receptionists. We are grateful that in most cases our patients are understanding of the above and request appointments only where necessary. We thank you for working with us to make the most of the available appointments.

Increased Access Appointments

Severnbank Surgery are part of the group of Forest of Dean Surgeries who offer Increased Access appointments. These ‘HUB’ appointments are available to be booked through reception, and consist of appointments either here at Severnbank Surgery, or at one of the other participating surgeries in the Forest. These appointments can range from morning and afternoon appointments, to late evening and Saturday mornings as well.

For details, please go to the Forest GP Surgeries website: www.forestgpsurgeries.co.uk.