Fed up of calling at 8am for an appointment?

 

Things are changing.

On Wednesday 28th May we held a patient meeting at St Lukes church to discuss the problem's patients experience when calling for appointments at 8am and to hear their (your) concerns and frustrations.

Thanks to all of our patients who attended, it was incredibly encouraging to see your passion for change and desire for a better system, something we feel strongly about and share with you.

8am Rush

We shared our desire to see an end to the 8am rush at Dashwood Medical Centre and discussed our plan to go about making this much needed change.

As part of the change, we will have to implement a few steps. These are as follows:

Triage Hub

All Anima requests submitted to us will go into our Triage Hub. As requests come to us, our clinical hub team will look at, triage and action requests, ensuring that our patients receive what they need when they need it and not on the basis of first to get through on the phones.

Giving appointments based on clinical need ensures everyone who needs to be seen, is seen in a timeframe appropriate for their clinical need.

The quality of information provided by our patients through Anima allows our Clinical Triage Team to action requests real-time in the most effective and time efficient manner. It might be that you need to see a Physiotherapist instead of a GP, you might need a blood test before the clinician sees you, it could be that a referral can be made without the need for an appointment. These actions are made possible by the information you provide to us through Anima which in turn will free up more appointments, helping to ensure that those who need to be seen, are seen when they need it.

Thank you for working with us as we implement this change. Just like you we want to see things get better and for appointments to be more readily available to our patients at Dashwood Medical Centre. It will take some time for us to get this right but we are confident that this change will have a positive impact in the same way it did when we implemented it at Northdown Surgery, which helped us to increase daily patient contact significantly.

We want to provide the best care and experience for you. Please help us as we seek to do this and implement the change.

To assist in making the 8am rush a distant memory, we will be moving to Clinician Lead Digital Triage, supported by a system called Anima. You can begin signing up and registering for an Anima account now

Published: May 30, 2025