Five White Street Surgery would like to extend a sincere thank you to all patients who recently completed our Patient Feedback Survey. Your responses will help us prioritise areas for improvement. We are pleased to see overall improvement in our reception services since the last survey in 2019, and we are happy that we have continued to score in the high percentiles for overall patient satisfaction.

Your responses in the recent survey indicate that these are our strengths:

• The clinical team really listened to what you had to say

• The clinical team made you feel comfortable

• The clinical team had enough time to talk about the things that were important to you

• The reception team were professional in dealing with you

• The reception team were welcoming upon your arrival

The questions that had the lowest satisfaction score were:

• The time you had to wait to get this appointment (66.24%)

• Let you know about any delays while you were waiting (67.87%)

• Getting reminders for your appointment (77.53%)

• Getting an appointment for a time that suited you (78.28) 

It is clear from the latest responses, that satisfaction with appointment availability, wait times and appointment reminders has fallen.  

We will be working on improving these areas in 2023-2024.

At the time this survey was conducted, general practice across the country was experiencing a period of high demand and long wait times.

It seems that following the pandemic, some medical practitioners nearing retirement brought their retirement forward or reduced their working hours. While this wasn’t the case for 5wss, this effect across the industry has presented a challenge for all practices.  We believe this combined with patients following up on routine preventative health checks and other care that they may have delayed during the pandemic has created a challenging situation.

While the situation with the wait times to get a routine appointment seems to be improving, we are also actively seeking to attract a new part time GP to increase our appointment capacity.

While some delays while waiting for your doctor after you arrive are unavoidable (for example an urgent or complex situation has arisen in a consultation before yours) it is our policy to inform you of delays or lengthening delays.  We are reviewing our staff induction and training processes and will address this with out team members to make sure that we give you as much information as we can about delays. After all if it looks like an extended delay, you might prefer to pop out to a local café or do a bit of shopping  for a while.

We are also going to review our appointment reminder system. Unless you have opted out of SMS messages from the practice, you should receive a text message reminder the day before about your appointment.  As you check in at reception in the near future, you may be asked to confirm if you would like to receive text message communication from us.