Message from Belle Vale Medical Practice

It's our policy not to reply to individual comments on social media, but some incorrect comments were recently made. These were in public forum and our responses are as follows:

1 That members of the admin staff are lying about the unavailability of appointments. Our response: Our staff do not lie about the lack of appointments.

2 That we have not gone back to 'normal' following covid-19, and we are "all working from home".  Our response: We are not working from home, however we are working differently. We are dealing with more patients by telephone - and this allows GPs to help more people in total then we were doing before the pandemic. It also means you will see fewer patients in the building.

3 We no longer do home visits. This is incorrect. So far this year we've done 104 home visits

4 An allegation was made about another local GP, which we have passed on to them.

We accept that it's difficult to get an appointment with us and that we're not able to help everybody with every request. This is very frustrating for our patients and our staff. The problem is caused by a number of reasons:

1 Many patients have more complex difficulties than in the past, which requires more clinician time.

2 Some patients are awaiting procedures in other parts of the NHS. Whilst doing so, they need more support from their local GP.

3 GP practices are struggling to recruit clinical staff. This is a national problem, caused by government failure to train doctors, early retirement of GPs who have had enough, and Brexit, which contributed to one of our GPs returning to Spain.

We are happy to receive constructive feedback and suggestions. However we will treat unsubstantiated and false allegations against us as unacceptable behaviour which may lead to a breakdown in trust. Repeated unacceptable behaviour may lead to us having to remove a patient from our list.

Our admin and clinical staff are working in difficult circumstances, and it doesn't help anyone to make comments in this way. The root causes of these difficulties are outside our control. We look forward to working with all our patients in a positive way in the future.