02/04/2026
At Greystoke Surgery all of our team work very hard to make sure our patients get the care they need. Sadly, the funding we receive to do this does not come close to keeping up with the ever increasing demands on our services. Did you know that we receive just £130.07 per patient per year to pay for staff, equipment, electricity etc, regardless of how many times each patient needs to be seen? As the average UK patient has 7 appointments with their GP practice a year, not to mention prescriptions, letters & other interactions with the practice all of which take time & care, we have to work as efficiently as possible to be able to offer appointments to everyone who needs one.
Asking you, or a receptionist on your behalf, to complete a brief online form when you have a problem is one of the ways we work efficiently. Every day, our Duty GP goes through more than a hundred of these requests to allocate the most appropriate appointments, as well as saving appointments by sending you written advice, signposting you to another more appropriate service (such as the Walk in Centre for injuries or your dentist for problems in your mouth) or by arranging a prescription.
Similarly, we will often message you or ask our receptionists to phone you to relay a message about test results. We appreciate that you might prefer to speak to the doctor or nurse, but routinely doing so would create a waiting list for appointments of many months, leaving us unable to deal with new problems or see unwell people promptly.
What can our patients do to help?
By being specific and giving us a little bit of detail you help us to triage your request more efficiently.
Please trust us to allocate you a suitable clinician for your problem. If you think there's a particular reason why the appointment offered isn't suitable please explain why. We are fortunate to have a great team of different professionals, many of whom are far more expert in their fields than us GPs!
It's great when people are invested in their own health so feel free to ask questions or for more information, but please understand that we may not have capacity to offer you an appointment for this & might send you an information leaflet or direct you to information on a website instead.
We're so grateful for all the kind words and simple 'pleases' & 'thank yous' we receive from patients and relatives every day - this really does make all the difference to us.
Please understand that it is not our job to complete work on behalf of our hospital colleagues. If a hospital clinician wants you to have a sick note, urgent prescription, blood tests etc it is their responsibility to do this. Sometimes they will ask us to take over aspects of your care outside of their area of expertise: communication from the hospitals takes time to arrive and be processed, so please wait 7 days before contacting us to discuss such issues or request ongoing prescriptions, and more often than not you'll find we will have already sorted them for you before you need to get in touch.
Please also understand that whilst we appreciate long waiting times in other NHS services can be very frustrating, these are not under our control and we cannot influence them. Sometimes frustrated hospital secretaries will suggest you ask your GP to write a letter to expedite your appointment. The only time this makes any difference is if your problem has changed significantly since we referred you, in which case we definitely want to know about it.
Thank you for your ongoing support.
Drs Marshall, Shaw, Jerram & Willey
