Stokes Medical Group

25/12/2025

🎅🏼 The team at Stokes Medical Group would like to wish you a very merry Christmas. 🎅🏼

The merger between Stoke Gifford Medical Centre and Bradley Stoke Surgery did make this a very busy year. We have worked hard to minimise any disruption and thank you for your patience. We are taking a number of steps to improve resilience and enhance access and remain confident that patients will be seeing the benefits of our working at scale. We have further plans for improvements in 2026 and are enthusiastic about what the coming years will bring.

In the run up to this busy festive period, we have been hit significantly by staff sickness. This is inevitable given all the bugs that are circulating, and our team have worked hard, and often through illness, to continue to provide our services. We appreciate that this may have led to some appointments being cancelled and are grateful for your understanding and patience while we navigate this. To support the team and the wider NHS this winter, please do: take the opportunity to be vaccinated if eligible; consider self help and use of pharmacy if you have a viral infection, and check the NHS guidance for your condition at https://www.nhs.uk/conditions. These steps will allow us to focus on the acutely unwell.

Best wishes for a healthy and happy 2026!

Find out about health conditions, including their symptoms and how they're treated.

23/12/2025

19/12/2025

Cost of not attending appointments

Recently, we have been hit with significant staff sickness and have had to cancel a number of appointments. We apologise for the inconvenience that we know this will have caused. We are working hard to rearrange appointments for those affected.

The imposed shortage of planned capacity has shone a light on the number of lost appointments that arise when patients failed to attend. We appreciate that there will be occasions when patients need to cancel or rearrange appointments. However, these appointments can be utilised for other patients, and it is very important for these to be cancelled with as much notice as possible. Appointments can be cancelled via the NHS app, by calling the practice and selecting ‘click to cancel’, or by submitting an Anima request through the website.

If you do not attend or cancel a pre-booked appointment with less than 6 hours notice, this will be noted on your records. Where there are frequent missed appointments, we will write to patients and can remove patients from our list if appointments continued to be missed. This is a last resort for us, and we consider all removals on a case-by-case basis. However, with the pressures on the NHS, it is very important that we minimise waste and take steps to address frequent non-attendance.

Please help us by ensuring that you cancel any appointments as soon as you realise that you will not be able to attend