Abbey Medical Group would like to thank you all for your patience and support during these very difficult times. We have worked very hard to ensure the safety of both our patients and staff, whilst trying to provide a service to 12000 patients across two sites during the COVID pandemic.
There are times when we have to make the difficult decision to restrict some of the usual services we provide during the day to day running of the practice. We have always followed the latest guidance from the government when doing this. These restrictions have to be put in place to protect our most vulnerable patients and staff, and are constantly reviewed. As an added precaution we have adopted a locked door policy at both our sites, as the safety of our staff is paramount, we cannot maintain a service if all our staff are unwell.
During the pandemic we have continued to offer a triage service to all patients, which enables all patients to be screened before they attend the surgery. This has had a big impact on the amount of incoming and outgoing telephone calls especially first thing in the morning during our triage service. Our staff are continuing to work extra hours to enable us to manage the incoming calls but we still find that we are very busy first thing in the morning when the phone lines open. Please can we kindly ask our patients to try and call later in the day if your call is not of an urgent nature.
When the restrictions were lifted for a short time during the summer of 2020 we did provide the extra clinics to catch up with our essential services, such as baby vaccines, smear clinic, coil clinics and contraception advice and many others. We have also continued to provide a lot of our yearly long-term condition reviews over the telephone.
We have recently had a complaint about our management of smear clinics that included cancelling appointments for patients during cervical smear awareness week. We would like to apologise for any distress this caused our patients. We took immediate action to investigate the concerns raised.
Unfortunately this was down to an administration error from outside the practice. The practice followed the usual guidance we receive on a regular basis which advised us to suspend some services during the current lockdown. We didn’t see any reason to question this information, as we had previously suspended some services during the first lockdown. Once we realised an error had been made and that smears were not on the list of restricted services the management team reacted promptly and resolved the issues quickly and efficiently. All patients involved were contacted within 48hours and had their appointments rebooked.
Abbey Medical Group prides itself in offering you all an outstanding service with a high level of care to all our patients and really appreciates your continued support. We are all looking forward to a time when we can have some form of normality in our lives and hope that once again our doors will be open to you all.
