‘Making an appointment for my dog to see the vet is easier than it is to see a doctor.’

A Gillingham resident is worried face-to-face appointments with GP’s are being ‘fizzled out’ after The Barn Surgery in Gillingham announced it is using the Total Triage system for ‘at least six months’ while it undergoes refurbishment.

An announcement from practice manager Katie Pearce, Dr Lewis and Partners said: “From April 14, we are bringing in a better system of allocating appointments, with the clinical team assigning the right type of appointment at the right time, based on information from our patients.”

Patients must fill out an eConsult form online. If this is not possible, they must answer triage questions on the phone. And Gillingham Surgery Partner Dr Chris Pearce said he anticipated ‘slightly more face to face consultations’ under the new Total Triage system.

“Whilst it is correct that one of our two sites is currently undergoing refurbishment, it is not the case that face to face consultations will be any less available under our new Total Triage system, or during the period of refurbishment. We would probably anticipate conducting slightly more face to face consultations than we do at the moment,” he said.

“We have invested in an informative digital telephone system which shows us that unfortunately we are unlikely to ever be able to answer enough phone calls to meet the current level of demand for appointments and advice. The very necessary response to the covid pandemic has reduced the degree of continuity of care we can offer our patients. We believe that continuity of care makes General Practice safer, more effective and more personal. So we have decided to triage all requests for appointments and advice, twice a day, using our clinicians.”

“They will allocate face to face appointments, home visits, phone calls and time for remote responses to the GP who knows the patient best, taking into account the relative urgency of the query.”

Dr Pearce added: “We have been using eConsult for over a year, so it is isn’t that this is a new development. The hope is that rather than reverting in six months, our patients will find that they get to interact with their own GP more of the time, we don’t ever “run out” of appointments, and their queries and problems are dealt with much more quickly. So ideally our patients will want us to keep working like this once our second site is back in action.”

The resident, who wants to keep her identity private, says she has lived in Gillingham her entire life and is upset it is getting harder to see a doctor.

She said: “I really hope the new system works. It has been easier for my dog to have a face-to-face consultation with the vet.”

Total triage was established during lockdown to minimise the spread of coronavirus. It was never meant to be a permanent change to the way GPs work. Nor was it ever claimed to be a satisfactory replacement for face-to-face consultations.
For an appointment go to gillinghamsurgery.co.uk and click on Consult your GP online.

For details about eConsult go to econsult.net/nhs-patients.

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