How to Make and Cancel an Appointment

Here's how you book an appointment:

Routine Appointments

All routine appointments are now pre-booked in a 10-minute time slot. These will be either face-to-face or telephone appointments, depending on clinical need.

If you have multiple issues, your GP is likely to be unable to discuss all of these within the appointment. You will be asked to book a further appointment to discuss any issues that cannot be safely discussed within the 10 minute appointment.  

Routine appointments will be booked with your named GP for continuity.

To book a routine appointment:

• Please call the PC team after 9am.
• Or you can complete an online consultation - visit our online consultation (Anima) page for more information on how our online consultation appointments work.
• Please do not email. We do not accept emails to the practice email address from patients, please use our Contact Us form instead.

If you need an urgent appointment

If your issue is medically urgent, please call the team from 8am, Monday – Friday. The earlier you can call the better.

The team will ask a series of questions, and you will be added to the duty GP list. The duty GP will triage all urgent requests and deal with them appropriately. If it is felt your request is not urgent, you will be booked a routine appointment.

As with our previous telephone triage system, our Patient Co-ordinator team will ask for more information about your problem, and signpost you to the most appropriate person to help with it. This could be a GP, our Emergency Care Practitioner, or self-care advice through community pharmacists, etc. It is vital that you give the Patient Co-ordinator as much information as possible, as this is passed to the doctor who can prioritise accordingly

The GP will provide an initial telephone assessment and will only ask you to attend the surgery if they consider it is appropriate for your condition.

Late for your Appointment?

Due to an increasing number of patients checking in late for their appointment, or presenting at the incorrect site, we have implemented the following.

If you attempt to check in more than 3 minutes late:

• You will not be checked in, and be asked to rebook your appointment.

Most of our appointments are for 10 minutes, so being 3 minutes late means you have already missed 30% of your appointment time.

If you arrive at the incorrect site:

• If there is not enough time between your arrival time and the time of your appointment to travel to the correct site (usually takes at least 10 minutes), we will need to rebook your appointment.

You can attempt to travel between our surgeries, but if you try to check in more than 3 minutes late you will not be checked in and you will have to rebook.

Walk-in Patients

Please note the surgery does not provide a walk-in service. You will be asked to leave the surgery and follow the procedure above to make an appointment, even if it is urgent.

Victoria House Child Health Clinic

• (Doctor/practice nurse) Tuesday Morning - these are pre-booked appointments, please call the surgery to make an appointment

Choice of Doctor

We would encourage you to get to know and see one doctor who would be your registered doctor (except under exceptional circumstances), especially if you have an ongoing medical condition or need a follow-up of some tests or a referral which might have been instigated by a particular doctor.

Seeing several different doctors about the same problem can potentially lead to a delay in diagnosis and instigation of the appropriate treatment.

Text Message Reminders

You can now register to receive information by text message on your phone regarding appointments and health care. 

If you wish to register for this messaging service please fill out the consent form.

New Data Protection Regulations from May 2018 (GDPR)

Under the new data protection regulations introduced from May 2018, we will continue to contact patients via text and email messages regarding the delivery of care if they have provided consent to do so.

If practices are sending messages about recommended treatment for the management of a specific health issue, then this is defined as providing appropriate care for patients, not marketing purposes.

If you would like to opt out of any future contact via text and email messaging, then please complete the form linked above and indicate in the marked section.

Interpreter Service

If you do not speak English, or you are deaf and use sign language, we can arrange for an interpreter to help during your consultation. You must tell the patient co-ordinator that you require an interpreter at your consultation, and which language you use. It is important that you and the doctor, nurse, or other practitioner can understand each other so that they can accurately help you. More details of interpreter services can be found if you click here to find information provided on the Healthwatch Oxfordshire website.

Extended Hours

For our patients who may need a weekday evening or Saturday morning appointment, there is a service provided by the Bicester Primary Care Network at Montgomery-House Surgery and Bicester Health Centre. Please click here for more details.

Cancellations

If you cannot attend an appointment for any reason, please inform us as soon as possible.