Appointments
Routine appointments
You can make an appointment by telephone, calling in at reception or online. You can make an appointment with the health professional of your choice if available. The receptionist will guide you by asking you for details of the problem. You can also use the accuRX patient triage.
If you have several different problems to discuss, please ask for a double appointment. Your doctor only has 10 minutes allocated for each routine consultation and may be unable to deal with more than one problem in 1 slot.
Care Navigation
We will start to ask for a brief outline of your problem when you call to make an appointment at the practice. This isn’t because our reception staff are nosy but it’s a new approach that we call care navigation.
Through specialist training, our team can now offer more choice on who to see in the practice and help you get to the right health professional fast. Our receptionists never offer clinical advice or triage; this is about offering you the choice to see other specialists in our practice team if they have the expertise to deal with your problem; often quicker and without the need to see the GP each time.
For example, we often get calls that can be dealt with by a physiotherapist, the pharmacist, sometimes even the secretaries, that you may not be aware of if you haven’t visited the practice in a while.
By working this way, it helps us to free up time for GPs to care for our patients with complex or serious health conditions. More importantly though, it means you are seen by the clinician that is best placed to deal with your problem each time you visit us. The choice is up to you.
It would help the team to help you if you were to inform the receptionist why you need an appointment to see a GP.
Interpreting
At Richmond Medical Centre, we take into account all possible needs of our patients which includes providing an interpretation service for those who have a language barrier. The service we use is called LanguageLine Solutions UK.
LanguageLine Solutions provides interpreters for people whose first language is not English, to enable them to access services throughout South Yorkshire and beyond.
They provide interpreters to work within the health service but also for other organisations in the public and private sector.
When you book an appointment here at Richmond Medical Centre, please make staff aware that you will require an interpreter and we will take care of the rest.
Urgent Appointments
We save a number of appointments each day for patients with problems that are medically urgent and need dealing with today. The receptionist will ask for a general idea about what your health problem is so that we can make sure that you see the most suitable person. We do understand that there may be times when it is not comfortable to discuss your health with the reception staff, but we hope that you understand the reason behind this. If you feel strongly that you do not wish to tell the receptionist about your health problem, please make this clear and they will understand.
Some same-day appointments are offered by highly-trained nurse practitioners who can assess your problem, recommend treatment and, where necessary provide a prescription. If your problem is particularly complex, the nurse practitioner may call on the duty doctor for a second opinion. There is always a duty doctor available in case a second opinion is required.
Cancelling your appointment
If you have made an appointment and then decide it is no longer needed, please telephone us to cancel the appointment so someone else can have that appointment.
Alternatively you can use our online form below.
We effectively lose 600 appointments every year through people forgetting to cancel appointments.
Consult with a Doctor online
You can now also contact a Doctor online using our online triage tool, click below to access.
Extended Access
We are able to offer Out of Hours appointments with a GP, Nurse, Health Care Assistant or an Advanced Nurse Practitioner. Please ask staff for information.
Home Visits
Here at Richmond Medical Centre we provide home visits to patients who are unable to attend the surgery. This includes patients in residential/care homes and patients who are housebound (unable to leave the house at any time).
If you need a home visit, call the surgery before 10:30am so that we can get a doctor out to see you that same day.
Please do not ask a doctor to visit you at home unless the patient is really too ill or infirm to come to the surgery. Remember the Doctor can see five patients in surgery in the time it takes to make one home visit and there are better facilities for examinations and treatment in the surgery.
Except in the case of acute emergencies all home visits should be requested before 10.30am, please explain what the problem is to the receptionist as this will help the doctor. Home visits will be made after the end of surgery.
