Dear patients, we thank you for your patience during what is a difficult and frustrating time for the practice. We are aware that there is a lack of routine appointments in the coming weeks. Usually, routine appointments are booked up to two weeks in advance, and all routine appointments for the coming two weeks are indeed full. Thereafter, we go into a period of switching over our operating system, which is something we have to do rather than have chosen to do, and will necessarily involve disruption, as we do not have full access to medical records for a period. Please see our website for details at https://www.clarkstonmedical.co.uk/vision-migration
Rather than offer appointments that we would then have to cancel due to the operating system not being up and running when expected, we are instead focusing on dealing with urgent problems, i.e., illness that can be assessed there and then during that spell. We will not have access to your blood results, hospital letters, full past medical history etc.Please rest assured that as soon as it is evident that we will be able to do so, our routine appointments will open up again. In order to alleviate some of the burden, we will open up routine appointments five and six weeks from now, which is longer than usual, for patients with truly routine issues, such as referrals for hearing assessment or knee replacement, to be able to get appointments booked in for the latter half of July.
Rather than offer appointments that we would then have to cancel due to the operating system not being up and running when expected, we are instead focusing on dealing with urgent problems, i.e., illness that can be assessed there and then during that spell. We will not have access to your blood results, hospital letters, full past medical history etc.Please rest assured that as soon as it is evident that we will be able to do so, our routine appointments will open up again. In order to alleviate some of the burden, we will open up routine appointments five and six weeks from now, which is longer than usual, for patients with truly routine issues, such as referrals for hearing assessment or knee replacement, to be able to get appointments booked in for the latter half of July.
Please also note that in the second half of July, a new partner will be joining us, thereafter the practice will have a greater number of appointments. We would therefore hope that within a month of him starting, we will have caught up on the backlog created by the change of our operating system.
Once again, we do thank you for your patience in this matter, which hopefully is a once-in-a-generation level of disruption to service. We, like you, look forward to resuming our normal level of service as soon as we possibly can.