Confidentiality
The practice complies with Data Protection legislation and we make every effort to preserve patient confidentiality. We ask you for personal information to ensure that you receive appropriate care and treatment. For the practice to function effectively it is sometimes necessary for medical information about you to be shared between members of the practice team. It will be shared with others only to provide further medical treatment for you, e.g. from hospital services, or to enable you to access other services, e.g. from the social work department.
Complaints
We aim to give a friendly and professional service to everyone who attends our practice. However, if, for any reason, our service should fall below our patients’ satisfaction, we take all complaints very seriously. If you would like to make a complaint regarding the surgery or the services we offer, please contact the Complaints Manager, either by telephone or in writing, who will make every effort to respond to your concerns as soon as possible. All complaints will be treated as confidential.
The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman website contains detailed information on raising a complaint about any aspect of the NHS in England. There is also a leaflet explaining the procedure of bringing a complaint to the ombudsman.
Accessible Information Standard (AIS)
The Accessible Information Standard (AIS) is a new NHS England information standard which must be implemented by all organisations that provide NHS or adult social care.
The AIS aims to ensure that people who have a disability, impairment or sensor loss receive information that they can access and understand, for example in large print, braille, professional communication support if they need it such as British Sign Language interpreter.
We want to get better at communicating with our patients. We want to make sure you can read and understand the information we send you. If you find it hard to read our letters or if you need someone to support you at appointments, please let us know.
We want to know if you need information in braille, large print or easy read.
We want to know if you need a British Sign Language interpreter or advocate.
We want to know if we can support you to lipread or use a hearing aid or communication tool.
Please tell the receptionist when you arrive for your next appointment, or call us between 8.30am – 6.00pm.
This information will be recorded on your medical record in a standardised way and highlighted to ensure we have information on your communication needs. This information could be shared with other NHS and adult social care providers if they need it.
Freedom of information
The practice produces a complete guide to the information routinely made available to the public by our GPs. A copy of this guide is available from reception.
Patient charter
We aim to treat our patients courteously at all times and expect our patients to treat our staff in a similarly respectful way. It is your responsibility to keep your appointments, inform us of your past illnesses, medication, hospital admissions and any other relevant details. Our patient charter is available in full at reception.
For further information on any of our policies, please contact the practice manager.
Disability and discrimination
We will provide care, now and in the future, to all our patients without discrimination and irrespective of patient’s age, sex, race, beliefs or special needs. We expect that patients will show no discrimination towards other surgery users, members of the practice team or our colleagues in the NHS.