If you are unable to keep an appointment please telephone the surgery to cancel so that your appointment slot can be offered to another patient.
"In person" appointments can be made with a Doctor, Advanced Nurse Practitioner (ANP) or General Practice Nurse (GPN) at either Taymount Surgery in Perth or Scone Surgery. These slots are 15 minutes in duration and are meant for only one person. Typically the clinician can deal with only one presentation during an appointment but if time permits, they may be able to deal with more than one. However, if this is not possible, you may be asked to book a further appointment. Double appointments are not possible at this time.
We offer a mix of advanced booking (up to 4 weeks ahead) and “on the day” slots for patients to book into. However, during times of planned or unplanned absence where capacity is reduced, or we are experiencing a period exceptional demand, our ability to offer advance booking may be significantly reduced in order to prioritise more clinically urgent cases.
Every effort will be made to offer an appointment with your preferred doctor. However, due to working patterns and as all clinician work across both surgery sites, this may involve a longer wait. To help with continuity for patients and clinicians, where it is available, patients may be offered an appointment at the alternative surgery site if they are happy to travel.
The practice has seen a significant increase in demand on our appointment system in recent times, and this continues to grow year on year. To help cope with this, we have introduced some additional non-GP roles, with carried skill sets, into the practice team in recent times e.g. Advanced Nurse Practitioner, First Contact Point Physiotherapy and a Mental Health & Wellbeing Nurse. For these reasons, patients will be asked to provide some details about their appointment before being booked in.
Many of the reasons that patients book a GP appointment could have been managed well by different clinician within the practice healthcare team. Please do not be offended if the reception staff do ask you a few more questions than you have previously been used to and offer you an alternative clinician to a GP. They have been asked to do this by the GP Partners, to help improve access to the most appropriate clinician for their needs for all patients.
There may be times when you would find it more convenient to speak to a clinician over the telephone and some examples suitable for a telephone consultation include:
- Advice or reassurance about a new or ongoing medical condition
- Advice about medication, which cannot be answered by your local pharmacy
- To request a medical certificate or a medical report
- Results of investigations which have been requested by a clinician
Each clinician will have a number of telephone slots available each day and the receptionist will arrange a suitable time for them to phone you back. To allow for hold ups with in person bookings, telephone appointments his will usually be within a window of time rather than a specifically stated time.
As with in person bookings, the receptionist will ask for a little information as to what is to be discussed with the clinician, so that they can be prepared in advance of calling you, which can make the call run more smoothly. This is also to ensure that a telephone consultation is suitable for your needs and that a physical examination is not likely to be necessary.
If you are requesting a home visit, please telephone before 10.00am, except in a medical emergency. Home visits are reserved for those who are housebound or seriously ill, otherwise we ask our patients to come in to the surgery if at all possible.
The receptionist will take gather some information around the need for a home visit and this information will then be passed to the duty doctor GP to assess. The doctor may call you back if they need more information to make a judgement as to the need for a visit or its urgency. If a home visit felt to be clinically appropriate, it will be carried out either by one of the GPs or by Advanced Practitioners from the Perth City Urgent Care Service. If, after triaging, the patient is asked to attend the surgery they will be given a time to attend one of the surgery sites on the same day.