News

Home Visits

(29 Jan 2020)

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.

Online Self-Referral for Sefton CAMHS

(16 Dec 2019)

Parents, carers & young people can now self-refer directly to the Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) via an online form on the Alder Hey website:

https://alderhey.nhs.uk/services/camhs

Alder Hey CAMHS offers specialist services to support children and young people in Sefton, up to the age of 18, who are experiencing mental health difficulties. They also provide support to their families or carers.

CAMHS works with the young people, parents, carers and partner agencies to make sure that the right care is provided to each individual, depending on their needs and circumstances. They can help with:

Anxiety
Attachment Difficulties
Conduct/Behaviour Problems
Depression
Eating disorders
Emotional and Behavioural difficulties in children with Learning Disabilities
Obsessions and Compulsions
Psychosis
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Self-harm
More complex psychological difficulties

The NHS App

(28 Jun 2019)

The Corner Surgery is now live on the NHS App! Our patients who are aged 13 or over can use it to:

Check your symptoms to get health advice;
Find out what to do when you need help urgently;
Book & manage appointments at the Surgery;
Request repeat prescriptions;
View your GP record securely;
Register to be an organ donor; &
Choose how the NHS uses your data.

For further details, please visit www.nhs.uk/nhsapp

or see this promotional video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/421wy0ND9Ls

The NHS App is really easy to use & it is an effective alternative to our current Patient Access Online Services system. It is available free to download for iOS from the App Store & for Android from Google Play.

Unlike our current Patient Access system, you can even prove your identity using the App itself without needing to bring any ID to the surgery. If you are already a user of Patient Access, you will be able to access exactly the same information on the NHS App as you currently do on Patient Access.

We would encourage all patients who are able to, to use the NHS App to book their appointments at the Surgery & to request their repeat prescriptions, as this frees up our administrative staff to deal with other matters. If you are having any problems using the NHS App, please click here to contact their team directly.

If you do not own a smartphone or tablet, you can still sign up for and use Patient Access instead.

Help Us To Help You

(15 May 2019)

Some of our policies & procedures are designed to make the surgery run more efficiently, allowing us to see & deal with as many patients as possible each day.

Home Visits

No other country has adopted the home visiting habits of British general practice. In the time it takes for the doctor to triage the visit request, pack up their equipment, print a summary of the medical notes, drive to the patients home, assess them, drive back to the surgery, document in the notes & arrange any necessary investigations or treatment, the doctor could have seen at least 5 patients in the surgery! In addition, it is much more difficult to assess patients in their own home as the conditions are suboptimal, & there are potential personal safety issues for doctors attending patients' homes alone.

Therefore, we have developed a detailed home visiting policy, which we share with a large number of other surgeries around the country, & we would encourage all our patients to read this if they are able to. The regulations state that "in the case of a patient whose ‘condition is such’, it is for the doctor to decide based on ‘the doctors reasonable opinion’ as to whether the patient should attend a doctors premises or be visited at home". Therefore, our policy is to offer a home visit to patients who are permanently housebound, severely disabled or reaching the end of their life.

Occasionally, patients will request a home visit because they feel temporarily housebound by their medical condition. We consider that if a patient is able to come to their front door independently to let the doctor in, they should be able to attend the surgery by taxi & we would expect such patients to do so. Furthermore, if a patient is so unwell that they are unable to come to their front door, it is likely that they are very unwell & as such, a hospital attendance via emergency ambulance is often a better option than a GP visit. If you are ever unsure about which part of the NHS to access, please ring 111 or visit https://111.nhs.uk.

Repeat Prescriptions

We require 48 working hours to process all repeat prescription requests - this means if you submit a prescription before midday on a Monday morning, it should be ready after midday on the following Wednesday afternoon. Issuing a repeat prescription is not a straightforward process - the doctors spend around 3 hours issuing repeat prescriptions every day. This is because we need to ensure a patient's medication & chronic disease monitoring is up to date, & that the timing of the request is correct. Therefore, please request your repeat prescriptions when you have about 7 days' supply left, to allow time for us to address any problems & for your pharmacy to prepare the medication. Your medication must be on your repeat prescription list in most cases.

Processing repeat prescriptions would be much quicker if more of our patients were signed up for the electronic prescriptions service (where prescriptions can be sent electronically direct to your preferred pharmacy) & online access to their medical records (where repeat prescriptions can be requested by computer). This removes the delay caused by our administrative staff preparing the repeat prescriptions & should be much more convenient for most patients. Please ask at our reception for more details. If a hospital advises you to start a new medication, we cannot issue it until we have received a letter from the hospital, so we can be sure they have properly counselled you on that medication. If they advise that it needs starting straight away, they should issue the first prescription themselves & we would encourage all patients to request this.

Thank you for helping us to make our repeat prescriptions process as safe & efficient as possible.

Zero Tolerance

(13 Mar 2019)

As an employer, the practice has a duty to care for the health and safety of its staff. The practice also has a legal responsibility to provide a safe and secure working environment for its staff. Therefore, the practice is committed to do everything possible to protect staff, patients and visitors from unacceptable behaviour, and has 'zero tolerance' of any incident that causes hurt, alarm, damage or distress.

Our practice staff are here to help you; our aim is to be as polite and helpful as possible to all patients. If you consider that you have been treated unfairly or inappropriately, please ask the reception staff to contact our Practice Manager who will be happy to address your concerns. However, shouting or swearing at practice staff will not be tolerated under any circumstances, and patients who are abusive may be removed from the practice list.

Examples of unacceptable standards of behaviour:

Physical violence or aggression
Verbal abuse or aggression
Racial abuse or sexual harassment
Offensive or threatening behaviour
Causing damage to or stealing from the practice premises
Abusing alcohol or drugs on the practice premises
Obtaining drugs or medical services fraudulently

Furthermore, the practice will not hesitate to take legal action whenever it is appropriate to do so. The whole NHS, including GP surgeries and especially locally, is working under unprecedented levels of patient demand and expectation, and we appreciate that this can lead to increased levels of patient distress. However, we hope that patients will agree that our staff are our most valuable asset, and that verbal abuse or aggression is unacceptable.

Thank you very much in anticipation of your understanding.