A note on NHS priorities, private insurance reports, and a reminder to be kind.
All patients have the right to expect a high level of service, and we want that for you, too.
We aim to be open about the challenges we face. We’ve shared articles about increased demand, reduced funding and more. Hopefully, you will have seen some of them.
When demand goes up or our capacity goes down due to staffing pressures or other reasons, we have to prioritise. That means dealing with urgent needs first and delivering our contract NHS services ahead of private work.
We are working flat out to cover our core work of seeing patients and managing your health. As a result, there is a backlog of private work, such as insurance reports.
We know this can be frustrating. Like you, it’s a situation we don’t want to be in. That said, we must put treating patients first.
Please be patient while waiting on an insurance report or other non-NHS service.
We receive lots of calls from patients chasing up their reports, and fielding these calls takes time.
Most patients understand the situation. But our team are being exposed to more and more abusive and unacceptable behaviour.
We want to remind patients about our zero tolerance policy:
“Any behaviour, verbal or physical, which causes staff to feel uncomfortable, embarrassed or threatened is totally unacceptable.“
This policy applies to all interactions with our team.
Whether you visit us in person, speak on the phone or send a message through ask my GP, we expect patients to be respectful and kind.
This time last year, Dr Davies wrote an open letter about the increase in abuse our team receive and the impact it has on them personally and professionally.
If you haven’t read it before, please take a few minutes to do so.
Despite the letter, and information we have shared about the challenges we face, we have not seen a decrease in this behaviour.
We are mentioning it again to repeat and underline that any form of abusive or threatening behaviour towards our team will not be tolerated, and could lead to you being removed from our patient list.