Routine appointments are available Monday to Friday and on some Saturdays and may be booked in advance. To see a particular clinician at the surgery and at a time of your choosing, please ensure you arrange your appointment well in advance. Appointments can be made for all clinician by telephone or in person at the Surgery or we have some limited appointments available via the online Patient Services website.

To ensure all our Nurse Practitioner, Practice Nurse, Healthcare Assistant and Phlebotomy appointments are booked appropriately and to minimise inconvenience, these need to be booked by calling and discussing with the reception team, who will book you into the right session based on clinical need.

The reception team will take every step to ensure your need/enquiry is handled on the same day by an appropriate member of our clinical team. To cope with this demand patients will find more information is required of them by reception staff and that telephone triage is used.

Local practices who pool their resources will provide alternative settings for certain procedures and patients can elect to use the Reading Urgent Care Centre in the Broad St Mall for same day assessment of minor illnesses by appropriately trained staff some of whom will not be doctors. Reading Urgent Care Centre is open 365 days of the year from 08.00 to 20.00.

We would ask patients to reserve the Accident & Emergency Department for solely life-threatening episodes or where there is an immediate need for X-ray investigation and that the Out of Hours service should only be used in instances of acute illness arising during the night or early morning.

Our surgery has an automated appointment booking system which operates 24 hours a day. It means patients can book appointments even during off peak periods, lessening the burden on staff during the very busy periods of the day. Importantly the system can/should be used to cancel appointments whenever the need arises. Your full co-operation with the above will ensure appropriate use of valuable NHS resources.

Telephone Triage

To help with the daily demand for face to face appointments, our receptionist, following guidance from the clinical team will ask for basic details of the medical issue that is presenting and a contact number from the patient. This information is then added to the triage list, whereby a clinician will then conduct a telephone consultation with the patient and advise on further management, this may involve coming down to the surgery to collect a prescription or a face to face appointment that day with an appropriate clinician for further assessment. Patients should keep the line available when a triage call is agreed, as busy surgeries mean the clinician can only call back each patient once.