Service Update

We are sorry for recent difficulties when contacting the practice. We are aware that telephones have been taking longer for us to answer recently and this has been due to the sheer volume of calls that the practice is experiencing. On a Monday for example the practice receives on average approximately 600 phone calls. The practice has also had some GP sickness recently which does impact the availability of appointments and which has resulted in the AskMyGP service having to close when the practice has received more requests that we have capacity for. This is for patient safety reasons. We are hopeful that now that we have got through the numerous bank holidays in April & May and provided we have no excessive GP sickness absences, that the AskMyGP service will be able to remain open for longer in the coming weeks ahead. Cherry Willingham Surgery is still open every weekday morning from 8:00 – 12:30pm and there is a GP working there along with one or two members of the nursing team on each day. There have unfortunately been several days over the last month when we have had to close the Cherry Willingham Surgery on the day due to having an intermittent fault in the IT connection which serves the computers and telephones. The NHS IT team have now been out several times to repair the fault and we are hopeful that this will not happen again going forward. I hope that this provides some clarity to the recent situation, and hope that you will find things back to normal when you next need us.