News

Practices in Basildon and Brentwood, Mid Essex, and South East Essex:

We want to provide the right services at a time which is convenient for you. We’ve listened to feedback from people in our local area, and we are making changes to our out-of-hours appointments to deliver better services for you.

The new way of delivering out-of-hours appointments will give you:

• Access to more healthcare professionals. This new service will be delivered by professionals including GPs, nurses.
• More choice about the type of appointment you want. These include a mixture of in-person face-to-face appointments, and remote appointments like telephone, video, or online appointments.
• Make it more convenient for you to travel to out-of-hours appointments. These appointments are being planned and delivered locally, so it is likely they will available closer to your home.

From Saturday 1 October 2022, out-of-hours appointments will be available from 6.30pm to 8pm on weekdays, and from 9am to 5pm on Saturdays.

Out-of-hours appointments were previously planned by Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) on behalf of many GP practices in a bigger area. From Saturday 1 October 2022, this is now being planned and delivered locally by Primary Care Networks (PCNs).

We are working together with other GP practices in our local area as part of the Phoenix PCN Primary Care Network. You can find out more about Phoenix West PCN Primary Care Network on our PCN website at https://www.phoenixpcn.nhs.uk/

An out-of-hours appointment might not be at your regular GP surgery. When you book an appointment, you will be told where the appointment will be.

These appointments will not be available as walk-in appointments. You will need to book them in advance

To book an out-of-hours appointment, you should contact your regular GP practice in the usual way. They will advise you on the appointments which are available, and which healthcare professional is the right person to help you.

If you need medical help now but it's not an emergency, you can also go to 111 online or call 111.

Some key facts for our patients. The more you know the more you can understand some of the processes and challenges we face.

Every GP practice in England must “hold a contract” with NHS England. As part of our contract we MUST make available a proportion of our appointments to 111. This allows 111 to triage patients and if appropriate book the telephone appointment directly with the practice on behalf of the patient. During the height of the pandemics we had to make available 1 appointment per 500 registered patients. For us that was approximately 31 appointments. These appointments must be spread throughout the day and are not to be booked by surgery staff. That was 31 additional patient contacts that had to be fitted in to already full clinic lists. We were able to do this as some other “contractual” work was paused to allow for the added pressures the pandemic was bringing. Fortunately as the pandemic situation eases we now MUST make available 1 appointment per 3000 registered patients, approximately 6 appointments throughout the day. We know you would like to know what the GP’s are doing in the time they have now they don’t have an additional 25 patient contacts to address. Completing medical reports that have been on hold which had created a backlog as it was non priority work, restarting services like joint injections, contraceptive fittings, minor surgery, increased workload of test results being generated as our patients are being held in our hands, primary care, for longer without the help and intervention of secondary care as they too are under enormous pressure and have incredibly lengthy waiting lists. Non of this is our patients fault but please understand this is not ours either. It’s the system we currently are working with and we are doing our very best to help you all. So when the receptionist suggest to you that you call 111 this is because they have available slots to book into that we can not use until the appointment time has passed by which time the GP’s have been given more admin duties in that appointment time so not a minute of their day and precious time is not dealing with patient care.

We understand the system is frustrating. We are constantly reviewing and changing what we can to make things better and more accessible for you but some things we contractually can’t change.