Peacock Surgery – Live from Monday 1st July 2024!

Sent to all patients registered with Stansted and Elsenham Surgeries

Sorry – a lot of information – but please take a moment to note some upcoming changes.

Important reminder for Elsenham Surgery patients:

On Friday 28 June 2024 Elsenham Surgery will lose access to their clinical system from 1pm. If you need us on Friday, please phone Elsenham Surgery as early as possible on Friday morning, and please help us by only getting in touch if your matter is urgent

The telephones and front door will remain open as usual.

Please do not send any online medical requests to Elsenham Surgery from 8pm TONIGHT (Thursday 27 June 2024) – for repeat medication or other enquiries, please email [email protected]

Elsenham patients with online access via the NHS App or Patient Access will need to reset their accounts next week, so their application is “pointing” at the correct surgery. Peacock Surgery’s ODS code is F81053

Request from both surgeries – as we are now heading towards the clinical system merger, and also the merger of our 2 telephone systems – as with all big projects, there may be last minute gremlins. We will not be able to text patients from tomorrow afternoon (Friday), so please keep an eye on our websites over the weekend – anything that you need to know will be posted on our NEWS pages, and also on the Stansted Surgery Facebook page.

https://www.thestanstedsurgery.nhs.uk/category/practicenews/
https://www.elsenhamsurgery.nhs.uk/category/practicenews/

We will launch a new website in a few weeks.

Some important changes for Elsenham Surgery patients to note:

From Monday 1 July 2024

– Surgery doors will open at 8am

– Surgery Telephone lines will open at 8am

Temporary caveat – Our clinical system at Elsenham needs to be uninstalled…and then reinstalled… on each workstation, on our Elsenham premises, on Monday morning – so there may be a little bit of interruption first thing on Monday morning. However, the Stansted Reception Team will be at full functionality from 8am, able to answer calls for both surgeries. We will have several IT engineers on our Elsenham premises on Monday morning to assist with the transition, and we will make sure our frontline team’s computers are prioritised.

Information for all patients to note:

Change is hard for everyone, and we are all feeling a mixture of excitement and anxiety about how things will go on Monday – please be respectful to our staff – The GP Partners will not tolerate abuse or disrespect to our staff, who always try their best to help patients. Please be patient with us, the 1st couple of weeks is an adjustment for us all.

When speaking to a receptionist, please give a brief description for the reason you require medical attention. This will help the team to connect your need with the most appropriate clinician.

Please remember that while the Reception Team is on our Appointment Book module, they cannot see clinical information about a patient (they can click over to the clinical module – but this takes time to load) – all they see is patient demographics – so if there is anything that the team needs to know about you, please tell them – for example:

“I am pregnant” or “I have just had a baby”

“I am short of breath, and have asthma/COPD”

“I am currently receiving treatment for cancer”

CHEST PAIN OR SYMPTOMS OF STROKE

These matters are potentially very dangerous and time is of the essence – please call 999 in the 1st instance.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stroke/symptoms/
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/chest-pain/

A brief summary of the appointment system we are trialing:

At the moment we have only put 2 weeks of July’s appointments onto our appointment book (for GPs). The Nursing Team appointment book is available for 4 weeks ahead. We will release more appointments once we see how well…or not… the system is working

All appointments are face to face by default. If you prefer a telephone consultation, please inform our Receptionist.

We will do our utmost to ensure that you are seen on the premises of your choice, but there may be times when this is not possible. If you can only get to a particular site, please tell our Receptionist.

What happens when we run out of capacity on any given day?

This happens most days, because demand outstrips capacity throughout the NHS. This is not our fault, but we always do our best to manage demand from day-to-day.

We will have a duty GP on each site. When we are fully booked, patients will be placed on one telephone triage list. Those patients will be called on the telephone by one of the 2 GPs on call that same day – and if the GP cannot safely manage the patient over the phone, the GP will bring the patient into the surgery for a face-to-face assessment.

Pre-bookable GP appointments:

We currently have a limited number of pre-bookable GP appointments available. This will be adjusted once we have a clearer understanding of how the current appointment book will function. We also hope to release more appointments for online booking but need a bit of time to assess demand vs capacity.

We understand that patients want to be able to pre-book appointments with a GP, but managing on-the-day demand is very challenging, even without prebooked appointments. If we come into the surgery and 50% of the appointment book is already booked, it means we cannot manage the demand that every day brings.

Once the merged appointment book settles down, we will have a more informed view on what GP pre-bookable capacity we can release to patients

Teresa Buglass

Practice Manager

Peacock Surgery