Our home visits are reserved for patients who are permanently housebound (those who require ambulance assistance to leave the house), severely disabled (where attending an appointment would require prior planning) or in the final days of their life. The whole NHS, including GP surgeries, is working under unprecedented levels of demand & expectation; we are seeing more patients than ever before & more work is being passed to GP surgeries, without a real-terms increase in funding. Whilst there are a number of reasons for our home visiting policy (please click here to read the policy in full), in the time it takes for one of our GPs to perform a home visit they could have managed a number of patients in the surgery. In the past, it might have been possible to visit patients simply because they did not feel well enough to attend the surgery on a particular day but this is no longer the case. We now need to apply our practice policy more consistently to ensure our service is as fair as possible for our patients; therefore, when requesting a home visit, please do not be offended if one of our receptionists asks which of the three criteria you meet. If a patient is too unwell to come to their front door & be assisted to attend the surgery by taxi, it is very likely that they are too unwell to wait for a GP visit or be treated at home, so we may recommend an emergency ambulance instead. Thank you very much for your understanding & co-operation.
