All our appointment bookings for the GP need to be requested through our online triage system.

All patients wanting to book an appointment with the practice are asked a specific set of questions. The information you provide will help our GPs direct you to the best healthcare professional within the practice.

You can request an appointment by:

• Completing an Online Form

• By Phone - Our Reception and Administration Team can complete the online form for you if you are unable to complete the form or if you do not have access to the internet or unable to use a computer, tablet, or smartphone.

• Visiting the surgery and speaking with our Reception/Administration Team - One of our team will complete the online form for you. 

Once your Online Form has been submitted. Your request will be reviewed and responded to by a member of the team on the same working day. You will receive a message from the practice confirming how your request will be handled. Please note: this may not mean you will be seen today, but you will be informed of next steps.

Please note we have sub-contracting arrangements on Thursday's between 1.00pm to 6.30pm to Causeway Green Surgery. During this time please call 0121 612 2500 for further instructions. You can still submit your appointment request online; your request will be seen and responded to by our Triage team the next working day.

If you need more urgent help, please call our practice on 0121 612 2500 and discuss your issue with the Reception Team.

If we are closed, visit NHS 111 Online or call 111. In an emergency call 999

Urgent Appointments

The GP will identify the necessity for urgent appointments. If identified, we will arrange an urgent appointment at the practice within 24 hours.

From 1st October, as part of a new NHS England & Department of Health initiative to improve patient care and access, we have moved to a Total Triage System.

This is a national NHS project, and all general practices must adopt the system.

Total triage is a system where every patient contacting a GP practice provides information about the reason for their contact before any appointment is booked.

All patient requests will be triaged by our triage team, who will decide what the best course of action is. Where necessary, we might ask you to answer a few additional questions to help our team prioritise those patients who need more urgent care.

You may be offered a face to face or telephone appointment; you may receive a reply from the Triage team with self-care advice, or you may be signposted to a more appropriate service.

Following any outcome, we will always try to make sure you know what to do if you believe your problem to be more urgent or should your symptoms worsen.

We want to ensure the process of booking an appointment with your GP practice as fair as possible, as previously patients were more likely to secure a same day appointment if they queued at our front door or called us early in the morning which put patients who are unable to do this at a disadvantage.

We found that patients who do not necessarily need a same day appointment were often seen when in fact a routine non-urgent appointment would have been more appropriate. This then resulted in us not being able to see patients who really needed an urgent same day appointment.

Also, patients sometimes do not see the most appropriate healthcare professional for their need, for example, instead of a GP, a patient could have seen a nurse, pharmacist, physiotherapist, mental health practitioner or an advanced clinical practitioner – for more information on these roles, visit https://www.england.nhs.uk/gp/expanding-our-workforce/

The new system we have implemented is called Total Triage.

The main purpose of Total Triage is to:

• communicate with patients in a timely way
• enhance the quality of care our patients receive
• ensure they are given the most appropriate appointment or advice to meet their needs.

You can still telephone the surgery or visit in person. The receptionist will ask you questions about your request to fill out the online form on your behalf.

Please submit One Triage Form for each Problem. If you have multiple health concerns, we advise that you fill in one triage form per concern.

This is so that the GP can make an accurate assessment of each individual concern.

Please ensure you provide as much information as possible per form.

Similar to the appointment process before we launched Total Triage where you would book one appointment per health concern.