Sadly General Practice has had their funding reduced year on year and we now face a very difficult time where we must reduce the un-funded or poorly funded work that the surgery and our staff do in order for the practice to survive. That means there will be occasions where we have to ask you to contact another service, wait longer for an appointment, or you may find it takes longer for us to answer the phone or process your prescription requests.

Your GP surgery are currently paid the cost of pet insurance for a hamster to provide you with all your care for a year, no matter how many times you attend or how complex your health needs are. We want to support our patients as best we can and that may mean that we have to prioritise more than ever before.

We have been informed that General Practice will receive an increase of only 2% in our funding this year, despite this being well below the rate of inflation. Coupled with this is the increase in our costs, like your household bills have increased, so have ours to run our building.

Our dedicated staff are the backbone of patient care, working tirelessly to ensure the well-being of those in need. Yet the National Minimum Wage is increasing without us being funded by NHS England to provide this increase to our team. This means it becomes increasingly challenging to retain talented individuals in our teams when they could go and work in a coffee shop for more money and less stress.

The outcome of this increased financial pressure means we may have to reduce staffing levels this year and also reduce our services in order to provide safe service levels that we can afford.

Many practices up and down the UK are closing, or becoming private GPs instead, meaning patients and their families are having to travel further for GP services, wait longer for appointments, and lose vital support from a team that have known them for decades. We don't want that to happen to us. We don't want GP services to be as hard and expensive to access as Dentists are.

We are doing what we can to fight to protect your local GP Surgery. If you can, please write to your MP about the financial pressures GP surgeries face and help preserve NHS General Practice for you and your family.

Almost 60 GP practices closed last year across the UK - Pulse Today

We are very pleased to announce that we have an automatic blood pressure monitor in our waiting room for our patients to use.

Patients will be able to come to the surgery Monday to Friday to use the machine, which is situated in the ground floor waiting room. The machine is fully automated and will provide a print out of the blood pressure reading for the patient to hand in at reception, once you have written your name on the slip.

This will reduce the pressure on appointments in the Nursing Team, thus allowing time for other healthcare appointments. Additionally, patients can take their blood pressure before seeing the nurse or HCA and hand the reading to the clinician, saving time during the appointment.

There are full instructions on the machine but if you are having difficulty managing to use the machine, please book an appointment with the Healthcare Assistant Helen for a blood pressure check so that this can be taken for you.

Anyone using the machine will be asked to santise their hands first, use a disposable sleeve, and write their name on the slip they give to reception or the clinician they have come to see. Patients will then be given further information on what to do depending on the result.

After many years of accepting repeat prescription requests over the telephone and following research within the local area, and direction from NHS England and the CQC, we have taken the decision to stop taking prescription requests over the telephone from 1st March 2023. Most practices in this area stopped this back in 2019. 

The first and most important reason is safety. We are getting increasing numbers of discrepancies between what the patient says they have ordered and what has been requested by the reception team. Mistakes are likely due to confusion with drug name.

The Practice is getting busier and busier with more people on repeat medication for ever increasing complex conditions. The decision was made to stop the taking of prescriptions over the telephone to minimise the risk of a potential error causing a significant event which has sadly been the case in some areas. 

We hope in making this change it will free up our phone lines for patients contacting us for other queries.

So as from 1st March 2023, the practice will not be taking prescription requests over the telephone – you can request your repeat medication by the following methods:

• Order online – to set up an online account, please bring a form of photo ID to the surgery.
• Using your repeat slip (right hand side of green prescription) – ticking the items you need to order and handing this slip into the practice or posting it to the practice

We understand that this might not be popular with some patients, but we hope that you will understand that safety is of paramount importance.

Please note that this will not alter the time it takes to process a repeat prescription which is 2 working days.

For patients over 65 years old, housebound or coded as vulnerable - phone ordering will still be avaliable.

We have sent this information out in advance on text message to patients with repeat medications during February.

Thank you for your understanding

Rose Medical Practice

The Team at Rose Medical Practice have been hard at work supporting our patients during September. It's been a busy one!

We've noticed we receive a lot of non-urgent calls at our busiest periods on the phones - for instance - Monday at 8.30 is very busy with patients calling to make same-day appointments but we also get people calling at that time to ask about test results or order sick notes. If your call isn't urgent for 8.30 am i.e. you're not making a same-day appointment, please call later in the day or on another day to avoid increasing the call waits for those trying to get through with urgent medical problems. Please be patient with us if you call at these times with non-urgent matters and we ask you to call back later, we really need to help those who clinically need our help before other admin or results calls. Thank you!

See our GP Patient Survey results