The Woodcote Group Practice
140 Chipstead Valley Road, Coulsdon, Surrey, CR5 3BBContact details and opening times
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Reviews
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Review titled Can't get an appointment
Rated 1 star out of 5
by Anonymous - Posted on 10 June 2024
Don't bother with this practice, you will never get an appointment as the surgery is massively oversubscribed (and yet still taking new patients!!). There are 3 hurdles: (1) the online booking system is useless, as it is only "open" between 7am and 4pm Mon-Fri. You literally can't use it outside of these hours. It's an online booking system - why does it have "opening hours"?! But even if I do log on when it's "open", I still can't book an appointment as "Clinicians are now working to capacity" and the option to book an app't is greyed out! Makes no sense for an *online* booking system! (2) The phones are always, always engaged. There is, mercifully, an option for them to call you back when you are #1 on the list, but that still means hours of waiting. Just now I was #20 in the queue - no chance they'll call me back before closing. (3) Even when you do get through, there's a 2 week waiting list for an in person GP. By then the problem might have run its course (with you in pain the whole time) -- or it might have got so bad you need to go to A&E! There is no point in signing up for this GP practice, because you will never actually see one of their GPs. Sign up to a different practice instead.
Visited June 2024
Review titled The Woodcote Group Practice
Replied on 09 November 2024
Dear Anonymous, Thank you for taking the time to post your review of our surgery. We are sorry if you have had difficulties booking an appointment via our online system, waiting times for an appointment or in getting through on the phone. In response to the issues you raised, Anima was introduced in order to deal with the large volume of requests that we receive daily and the need to deal with these using our finite resources. Our GPs triage all requests according to clinical need, which means that patients who have serious conditions will be seen immediately and those with minor conditions will be offered an appointment within 2 weeks or, if appropriate, will be directed to alternative services. A 2 week waiting time for a GP appointment is the current government expectations, however, over half of our appointments are actually same day. With regards to submitting requests out of hours or when our urgent same-day requests are at capacity - patients can submit admin/prescription queries etc at anytime. We are working with Anima to allow clinical requests to come through to the surgery out of hours, but this is a complicated area medico-legally as we need to ensure that no urgent medical requests can be submitted as it would be clinically dangerous to leave these unread overnight/over a weekend. Until these issues have been resolved, it is safer for the patient, to be redirected to NHS 111 when our capacity has been reached. Finally, with regards to our telephone system and waiting times to get through. Our average waiting time on the telephone is 5 minutes. We recommend all our patients should use the callback function so that they do not have to wait on the phone for this amount of time (or longer when it is at our busiest times of the day). All requests for callbacks are completed prior to staff leaving, so even if a patient were number 20 in the queue late in the afternoon, their call will be returned that same day. Kind regards, Deborah Roberts Business Manager